Running With My Eyes Closed

2008-01-03T12:02:00.000-05:00

Jill Golick's blog has moved. It's now at Running With My Eyes Closed otherwise known as www.runningwithmyeyesclosed.com or jillgolick.com. Click and you shall find.

New Posts

2007-09-25T09:17:00.000-04:00

Check out my new site for posts on Chuck and Journeyman.

New URL!!!

2007-09-22T12:26:00.000-04:00

Running With My Eyes Closed is moving. Starting Monday Sept 24 you'll find me at my new digs: jillgolick.com. Please update your feedreader, links and bookmarks.

K-Ville

2007-09-17T21:46:00.000-04:00

The K-Ville pilot, written by creator/executive producer Jonathan Lisco, almost looks like a front-loader. But it isn't. In fact the structure of this pilot is a thing of beauty which can only truly be appreciated in its deconstruction.

The basics: K-Ville is a cop series set in post Katrina New Orleans. The first episode is a premise pilot. It has four acts and a tag.

The series focuses first and foremost on Marlin Boulet, a cop who survived Katrina. His new partner Trevor Cobb is the second main player. Surrounding them are a cast of characters who populate the police force: other cops and the tenacious but good-humoured Captain.

Like many pilots we've seen, one major story thread sets up the series premise (A) and another involves the case of the week (B). A third storyline follows Marlin's relationship with his ex-partner Charlie (C).

Act One is made up of seven sequences.

The first shows us a man nearly drowning as the water reaches almost ceiling height with barely room for him to keep his head above water. This, we will realize later is Trevor Cobb.

In the next sequence we meet police officer Marlin Boulet. Katrina is flooding New Orleans. Pandemonium, water, citizens in dire need and at the height of the craziness, Marlin's partner Charlie bails, taking the squad car.

These two sequences aren't just here by happenstance. They are moments that have changed both men. Katrina reshaped the lives of both these guys and made them who they are when we meet them two years later in sequences two and three.

Is this front loading? Did Lisco just spoon feed us the premise? No. Over the course of the episode we come to understand the toll Katrina took on Marlin. Plus this first scene ties nicely into the Charlie C-story. And finally, Lisco is saving a reveal for the final scene of the episode, which sheds new light that first Cobb scene.

So the premise bookends the episode, with scenes at the top and bottom of the show that inform our appreciation of the series premise. And lots of scenes in between that slowly reveal how Katrina reshaped Marlin.

The third sequence in act one shows us Marlin two years after Katrina in a New Orleans that is slowly coming back. Devastation is everywhere including in this man, who is now making himself a sandwich and dancing to music that is playing. But he leaps out the kitchen window to tackle a kid trying to dig up his cypress tree. He threatens the kid and then asks about his parents. The sequence is all about what Marlin has become.

And sequence four shows us what Cobb has become two years later as he stands next to a car pulling a trailer and surveys New Orleans.

The fifth sequence brings the two men together. They meet and are partnered up by their captain with the rest of the squad looking on. The sequence also introduces the mystery surrounding Cobb. Why on earth would a northern become a New Orleans cop with all the problems Katrina has brought? He'd have to be "half a nut job". Cobb cheerfully accepts the title.

The sixth and penultimate sequence of the act shows us the two lead characters at work, policing a fundraiser. Marlin is drinking, but Cobb doesn't drink on duty. As committed as Boulet is to New Orleans and his job as a cop, he is not too worried about the rules. We're beginning to get a picture of him as an anti-hero, devoted to rebuilding his city, but lax about the law. A few little tidbits are dropped to help with the crime of the week plot and then we're launched into it with gunshots.

A wild car chase with lots of bullets flying is the final sequence of the act. The bad guys escape into the casino and the curtain drops.

The second act is made up of six sequences.

First, we're at the crime scene, but not to advance the B-story. Most of the action enhances our understanding of the series' characters particularly the gaggle of secondary cop characters who each get a pithy line. Marlin once again behaves as a guy on the brink, while Cobb presents as a serious investigator. The sequence throws to the first suspect, the victim's ex. But before we cut to him, we learn that the victim is dead which heightens the stakes for Marlin.

When we find him in the second sequence of the act, he's in the midst of torturing the suspect as Cobb looks on.

The third sequence of the act is a quick B-story recap with another opportunity for the minor cop characters to suggest that they'll be players in future episodes.

Sequence four takes us into the C-story and reminds us how Katrina has altered the courses of so many lives. Ex-partner Charlie shows up, desperate to be a cop again and redeem himself in Marlin's eyes.

In the next sequence, we go home with Marlin and meet the wife and kid who abandoned him. Or did he abandon them? Either way, everyone still loves each other, but Marlin's commitment to his city is stronger than his commitment to his family.

For the final sequence of Act Two, we get back to the B-story. Boulet and Cobb work another fund raiser. This one also gets shot up. Tons and tons of bullets fly. The pair race to their car to chase the bad guys but kaBOOM! Their car explodes. It's another act-ending action sequence.

Act Three is largely B-story although the first sequence strays into A territory when Cobb reveals knowledge of the city that a northern shouldn't have. It's another reason for his new partner to wonder about him.

The third sequence of Act 3 involves Charlie, so it's partly C-story. But Charlie is bringing information about the B-story crime.

Even the romantic sequence with the wife that is interrupted by the flood is really a B-story beat. The flood is the work of the criminals they are getting too close to catching. It is also a reminder of the legacy of Katrina. The sequence brings the act to the end. A pattern seems to be forming; every one of the three acts has ended in an action sequence.

The first sequence in Act Four brings us that statement of theme we've been waiting for. The arrested casino guard tells Marlin:

Your eyes right now? They're the eyes of a soldier on
the edge of a breakdown and a man who's not going to last.

But Marlin isn't a quitter. His essence was formed in that moment at the top of the show when his partner took off on him. Marlin will never do that. He will never abandon his duty to this city. And therein lies the show (or at least most of it): a cop driven to the brink but who refuses to give up.

Now that Marlin's nature has been revealed it's time to try to unravel Trevor Cobb. So in the third sequence of the fourth act, Boulet points a gun at his partner and asks how he knows how to get to some obscure gumbo joint when he's supposed to be from the north. Cobb isn't ready to reveal, so he stares down the gun and explains he was once stationed nearby. Which raises the question, just how close to the brink is Boulet?

Boom boom boom. Sequences four, five and six wrap up the B- and C-stories and we're into the tag.

The tag consists of three sequence. The first two are typical tag scenes that wrap up storylines: Charlie will survive and the neighbours love Marlin despite his flaws because he's saving the 'hood.

The third tag sequence is the kind of scene we save for pilot tags; the ones that throw a new twist on things and (hopefully) heighten the audience's interest in coming back next time.

This scene explains the first scene of the episode and sheds some light on who Cobb really is: an escaped prisoner who killed a man to survive and escaped punishment to recreate himself under the cover of the storm.

Whether you buy the twist or not, you have to admire the craft behind it. Once again, we're forced to consider the legacy of Katrina. Both men were changed. Marlin may have been a good man, but is now tortured, on the brink and lawless because of the storm. Cobb was a criminal, but Katrina turned him into a good guy. Both men are tied to the city and committed to rebuilding it.

It's great thematic material and Lisco has used it beautifully.

If the series is going to succeed and thrive, I think it needs three things:

It needs to maintain authenticity, not just in its portrayal of New Orleans but also in its crimes and criminals. The pilot's B-story had some holes in it and wasn't quite believable for me, particularly in the area of the criminals' motivation. They seemed to be serving the plot more than acting for their own good. You can get away with this in the pilot, but next week, when we show up to watch K-Ville, we'll be looking for a crime story.

Secondly, I wouldn't mind a toning down of the gun play. The big exciting act-ending action sequences keep the pilot moving and exciting. And New Orleans was once the murder capital of the U.S. but still, they fired a tom of bullets in that pilot. It wasn't credible in my opinion.

Finally, I think they need to keep these characters deeply troubled. There's always a temptation to redeem characters and make them heroic, but this series needs anti-heroes so I hope Lisco will keep the flame under them cranked.

Front Loaded Pilots

2007-09-16T11:31:00.001-04:00

My objection to a lot of the pilots we're going to watch over the next few weeks is that many of them front load their series premise. You'll see soon enough; shows in which there's a voice over to tell you how things came to be this way or the teaser is a vignette that sets up the series premise.

Can you remember all the way back to the Beverly Hillbillies and the theme song that set up the series premise? This is a very old-fashioned storytelling technique.

I think the most successful pilots of the new season don't front load the premise. Instead, they slowly reveal it through the episode. The characters and their world emerge bit by bit with twists and surprises along the way. Most of the pilots I've chosen to discuss over the next couple of months do that. Many of the ones I'm not going to write about are front-loaders.

Time to Watch Some New Shows

2007-09-15T17:50:00.000-04:00

I've made a few decisions about the new season and which pilots I'm going to breakdown. I'm going to start with K-Ville. It airs Monday Sept 17, 2007 at 9 pm on E! and Fox if you want to catch it before I post.

Mondays may be a problem night for me, because I also like Chuck, Journeyman and Aliens in America which are all also Monday night shows. Chuck and Journeyman both premier September 24th -- Chuck at 8 on Citytv and NBC and Journeyman at 10 on Global and NBC. I'll post shortly afterwards.

Luckily, Aliens in America doesn't premier till October 1 at 8:30 on SUNTV and CW, so that gives me some time to prepare a post.

I will probably also give you some thoughts on Pushing Daises which airs on Tuesday October 2 on CTV and Wec Oct 3 also at 8 on ABC (what a surprise, no simulcast).

I wrote about the Dirty Sexy Money pilot script, so I may go back and compare script and produced pilot sometime after that airs on CTV. Again, no simulcast here, so DSM has its A BC debut at 10 on Sept 26 and its CTV debut on Sept 30 at 10.

I may hit one or two of the others depending on mood and time, but the above is the current plan. So fluff up those pillows, grab the remote and settle in for some serious viewing.

(Btw, I’m not trying to be geocentric -- I just don't know what the air dates for these shows are outside North America. If you do, leave a comment.)

Things For You To Do While I'm Previewing the New Season

2007-09-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

I am getting prepped for the fall launch. That means watching as many pilots as I can get my hands on (thank you to my new best friends at CanWest Global who have supplied me with screeners) and figuring out which ones I'm prepared to watch 4 or 5 more times, so I can post about them.

While I'm doing that, Matthew Weiner of Mad Men thinks you should be writing your pilot. Okay, that's a bit of a stretch but Michael Patrick Sullivan at Red Right Hand met him at Sublime Prime Time and reports as follows:

Weiner's advice on pitching pilots (if you're not some established showrunner or big name writer): Don't pitch it. Write it. "Ideas are a dime a dozen...don't just be a guy with an idea, sit in a chair and write it...that makes you a guy with a..(miming the holding of a script)...a property. Sheryl Zohn said it a bit better. "It makes you a writer."

Check out the whole post here.

If you don't feel like writing, Geek Tonic has a post with links to pilots available for free viewing from Amazon Unbox. His links include Bionic Woman, Life and Journeyman. Also Chuck which I discuss after it airs September 24th. I haven't tried this yet but I suspect it won't work outside the US. Let me know.

If you don't feel like writing or watching, you can always friend me on Facebook.

The Shield

2007-09-10T11:24:00.000-04:00

This post is dedicated to my agent, Glenn, who love The Shield and always points to it as an example of a great television pilot. And I agree.

I'm all about first acts these days, so most of my comments will be about the first act structure and scene construction. (Which leads to a fair amount of character talk).

The first episode of The Shield is a typisode pilot, a rare sighting here at Running. The show launches us right into the world where we meet the characters mid-life. You want to know what an average episode of The Shield is like? This is a pretty good example.

You could argue that the murder that takes place at the end of the episode is an inciting incident for what follows and therefore this is a premise pilot. But that would be stretching it. The series isn't heavily arced and although Terry's murder does play later in the season, it's not a huge storyline. I'd guess that Creator/Writer Shawn Ryan put the murder in more to show us what Vic Mackey is made of than to set up the rest of the series.

Shawn Ryan, btw, teamed up with David Mamet to give us The Unit. And he has a hand in the Women's Murder Club one of the new fall series (but from what I've seen, it's not too strong a hand).

The tease of this pilot is great. It sets up the entire series premise by intercutting between two storylines and includes good measures of both comedy and action.

On the one hand, we've got Captain David Aceveda addressing the press and telling them how community policing is the right way to clean up his 'hood. On the other hand we've got Vic Mackey and his Strike Team chasing down a perp. (A story)

By the end of the teaser, we've had a picture painted for us of two men very much at odds over how policing methods. One is straight and narrow, law and order, by the book but with a taste for the press and a certain ambition. The other is a ruthless, lawless man of action, with a sense of humour, a sense of well-being and a sense of invulnerability. A clash between these two men seems inevitable.

The first act is made up of six sequences.

The first finds Claudette and Dutch at a murder scene and ends when they realize that the victim's young daughter is missing. (B-story)

The second sequence features a confrontation between the Captain and Vic over allegations that Mackey attacked a suspect with a pair of pliers. Mackey seems to come out on top. (A-story)

In the third sequence we return to Dutch and Claudette. They banter about personal matters before reporting to the Captain about the case and their next steps. (B-story)

The fourth is a Danny sequence. Dutch follows her into the kitchen and tries to arrange a date with her, but Vic comes in and teases Dutch till he leaves. Then Mackey hits on Danny and their on-going relationship is revealed. This sequence sets up the antagonism between Vic and Dutch and also the Dutch-Danny-Vic triangle. (C-story)

Next comes a short sequence of Terry watching Vic for the car. We know that Terry is an outsider and not privy to Vic's real business. (A-story)

And then to the park, for the final sequence of the act which gives us a nice end of act turn. The Captain enlists Terry's help in an undercover operation to bring down Mackey. Terry agrees for a price, but also suggests that the Captain's motives aren't pure. He knows that Aceveda is planning to use this for political gain. (A-story)

By the end of the act, there are a lot of balls in the air. The feud between Mackey and Aceveda is well established and the one between Mackey and Dutch is taking off. We're a few beats into the murder-kidnapping case and Claudette's irritation with Dutch's style is starting to show. Finally we know that Dutch has a crush on Danny and that will be complicated by her on-again off-again relationship with Vic.

There's a lot of character development throughout this act. To understand it better let's take a closer look at the two sequences in the Dutch-Claudette murder-kidnapping storyline.

Dutch is one of my favourite characters in The Shield. He's so repulsive in this episode but at the same time, you kind of feel for the guy because he's inept and wants badly to be good at his job and liked by people. He comes out of the box with a big personality, commenting on the murder victim's "rack", spouting FBI profiler mumbo-jumbo and setting his sites on Danny.

By contrast, Claudette is much lower key, but full of character nonetheless.

The first sequence is made up of four scenes: Dutch and Claudette at the murder scene. Dutch is commenting on the naked victim. Interestingly there is almost no police work done or mentioned in the scene.

In the second beat, Dutch follows Danny outside and does what for Dutch qualifies as flirting. In doing so, he gives us some information about the crime, but dressed up as big shot FBI profiler talk.

In the third scene, Dutch meets the sister of the murder victim. She falls on her knees in grief before him and the assorted cops watching snicker because she's in blow job position. But Dutch -- who moments ago was talking about a dead woman's breasts -- is humanized in this moment because he doesn't know how to react. He's embarrassed and upset for this woman and he doesn't like what the other cops are thinking. It's a very intense emotional beat.

And then comes a great turn that flips Dutch and us-as-viewers into a new emotional space: we learn that the victim has a daughter. In the fourth scene of this sequence, Dutch reports the news to Claudette, who has already figured this out because she's holding the daughter's photo. Now the question is, where is the little girl? With the killer?

The second Dutch-Claudette sequence starts with a line from Claudette which I love as a scene starter:

I stopped listening to you five minutes ago.

She and Dutch are at a hot dog stand and he's still talking his profiler-speak which is annoying Claudette.

In the second beat, they head inside passing Danny and Dutch's potential relationship with her becomes the subject of the conversation.

When they get inside the squad room, Captain Aceveda turns up and they give him a report on the crime. They give us the following new information about the crime: the father of the missing girl is a crackhead and Dutch thinks he's the killer and kidnapper and a known criminal visited the victim yesterday.

We see none of the police legwork that was expended to acquire this information. Until we get to the interrogation room, we see little actual policing. Ryan uses his screen time for character development. Even in the interrogation room, it's more about the police officers, their methods and what that says about them as people, than it is about the crimes and criminals.

The pilot episode of The Shield is meditation on character. The pilot and first act show us how Ryan manages to keep the thread of the criminal investigation alive with a minimal screen time. His supersizing of character development is what hooks us into the series in these early moments.

Murderati on Series Pitching in L.A.

2007-09-09T09:31:00.000-04:00

Murderati has a fun two-part post about the pitching process in LA.

Included is a checklist of things required before you can even get the meeting:

Item 1 – You must have a place of residence in Southern California. You may be able to swing a NY residence, but if you are truly starting out, it’s SoCal or nothing. X has covered this. Look it up, people.

Item 2 – You must have an agent. A legitimate agent. “Bob’s Talent & Pet Agency” in Pacoima is not legit. Your cousin acting as your agent is not legit. Some guy you met online who claims to be a manager is not legit… unless he can show you at least three working clients. Having 17 unemployed clients does not count. Besides, managers are for actors, or people who can’t get real agents. I know exactly one working screenwriter who has a manager (along with an agent), and that writer hates the manager. You don’t need to be with Endeavor (though it helps), but you must have an agent that is capable of having their calls returned.

Item 3 – You must have NO LESS than two samples of your writing. And I mean samples of one-hour episodic television writing. Three is really how many you should have, but you can get away with two if both are brilliant. Nowadays they should be original specs – meaning, they should be pilot episodes of some idea of your own. It used to be you needed specs of shows currently on the air (hit shows), but that’s more about getting a staff job, and we’re talking about how series are created. Oh, and it’s a good idea that neither of your samples are the show you are trying to sell. They can be, but it’s a slippery slope.

Item 4 – You must have the ability to check your ego. It’s okay to have an ego, but you must be able to sit across from an idiot who is telling you what’s wrong with the thing you wrote and, while you know with every fiber of your being that what is being said is complete horsepucky, you must be able to nod your head and say, “That’s interesting. I’ll take a look at that.” If you cannot do this, sell your SoCal residence, fire your agent, and burn your two specs. You will not make it.

He also talks about how you feel after the meeting with the studio"

You walk out of every pitch meeting thinking you hit a homerun. Thinking that they’re gonna be on the phone with your agents before you have your parking validated. As you take the elevator down to the parking garage, you’re trying to decide if you’ll buy property in Sun Valley or Martha’s Vineyard, once season five airs and your backend starts kicking in.

The second part of the piece -- on the network pitch -- is here.

2007-09-04T10:45:00.000-04:00

Kay Reindl at Seriocity has some really interesting things to say about pitching shows. She talks about how pitching works in LA and what some of her own meetings have been like. She goes on to talk about the components of the pitch, which are of course, the components of the series.

It's a great piece and you should read all of it, but here are a couple of excerpts. Reindl on the premise:

this should be clean and easy to grok. You shouldn't have to spend more than thirty seconds pitching your premise. And the rest of your pitch should only expand on that premise.

The characters:

they must rock. As simple as that. They need to make sense for the premise. An example would be the X-Files. Mulder's the believer. Scully's the skeptic. She's sent to keep an eye on him, but winds up having his back. Simple, right? Iconic, even. And they fit the premise. Your characters should feel like individuals. You should know their backstories, what got them into this predicament, why the show is about THEM, and how they react to what's happening to them. Arcs for characters are an excellent idea. Tell the executives where you want to take these characters. Know their voices, and incorporate them into the pitch.

Reindl on the engine:

this will be referred to as the franchise. What that really means is, what happens every week?

And on the world:

this is especially important when you're pitching a show that doesn't take place in our mundane, everyday existence. Pitching a genre show? KNOW YOUR WORLD. And the rules for your show. Does your show have a visual style? Know what that is.

These same elements are at the core of a great pilot script. The more you know about them, the better your pilot and your series will ultimately be.

PVR Watch

2007-09-04T10:42:00.000-04:00

Shawna at Shouting into the Wind has a list pilots and air dates for September and October. Get ready for some serious tv time in the next couple of months.

My Dirty Little Secret

2007-09-03T09:56:00.000-04:00

I've been a little light on the postings lately, for a variety of reasons.

One of the reasons is that there weren't that many new pilots on television in August and I've been in the mood for fresh pilots as opposed to archival. Plus looking ahead to September and October, I'm going to have my work cut out for me.

And then there's the end of summer thing -- rushing out to enjoy the last dregs before it's gone. Plus school's starting any minute and there are new shoes to buy, after school activities to sign up for and the whole sending lunch every day thing to dread.

But none of those are the real reason I slowed down.

I've been posting less, because I've been writing like a fiend. I had a big burst of energy on the pilot I've been developing. And when I finished my draft a week or so ago, I wanted a break from all things pilot.

I'm pretty pleased with my script. I've been working this concept for a long time. And this is actually the third pilot I've written. But this one slipped out the most easily and has by far the most energy and fun of the three.

Just before this draft, I did some major surgery on the premise and then I cranked up the character to eleven.

My original premise had CSI elements, a single character lead surrounded by a team of regulars and two mysteries in every episode. It's still got the two mysteries and some science, but I've gone from single lead to more of a buddy picture. I've lightened it up considerably, de-emphasized the mystery and added action and lots of humour.

While I’m happy with the draft, I'm by no means done. I particularly want to work on strengthening the first act and by that I mean making it more hooky. So you may note in these pages a new attention to first acts.

Here are a few stats from my script:

It's four acts and tag (I envision the series title before the first act) in 60 pages. The first act is 12 pages long, the second 15, the third 13, the fourth 16 and the tag is 4 pages. The first and second act curtains drop on B-story which is one of the two mystery of the week plots. The third, fourth and episode curtains turn on the A-story.

But here's my big dirty secret: it's a premise pilot. The two lead characters meet for the first time and we see the team form.

I know I know I know. I'm the one who says do not ever write a premise pilot for the Canadian market.

And you know why: you don't want to be forced to air any particular episode first. You want to take best advantage of your launch publicity by showing first time viewers the best episode you've got in the can. And a premise pilot limits you to showing only that episode first.

But I'm not there yet. I'm still selling the series. Using only a script.

And I think this premise pilot is my best hope for selling the franchise which brings together two unlikely people. And you kind of need to know how they got brought together before you settle down to enjoy their interaction.

So there it is. I have preached against the premise pilot for years now and I've gone and written one. It just goes to show, you should never listen to me.

K-Ville On Demand

2007-09-02T20:39:00.000-04:00

The pilot episode of K-Ville is up on Fox's website for you to see. Unless you can find some way around the geographic restrictions, you can't watch it from outside the United States.

I enjoyed it. I've only watched it once, so I don't have a lot to report. I can tell you that it's thick with character and has an action scene in most if not all acts.

Saving Grace - The Opening

2007-08-28T22:51:00.000-04:00

"Bring It On Earl", the pilot episode of Saving Grace, written by Nancy Miller, aired last night on Showcase. Last time I posted about it, I talked about the character of Grace Hanadarko. Turns out Grace's character is a theme tonight too.

Instead of breaking down the whole episode, I'm going to focus on the way the show opens right up to the first act curtain. We'll also get into a little scene structure.

Episode structure
This premist pilot follows a pattern we know. We've seen more or less the same shape in Veronica Mars, Burn Notice and Blood Ties. Mystery of the week plus the story that sets the series arc in motion.

In the arcing story (A), Grace meets an angel named Earl who has been sent by God to save Grace. By comparison to the B dyoty, the A story is filled with emotional jolts and interesting story turns.

The mystery of the week (B), on the other hand, has almost no emotional content despite the fact that it's about a kidnapped child. We don't meet the victim or her franctic parents, Grace isn't in the interview room with the suspect nor do we hear what Grace's friend the coach has to say about him. It does have a nice long action sequence in the first act.

The third thread that runs strongly through this pilot is Grace's character (C ). In pilots, we often see scenes devoted entirely to character that don't drive the story forward at all. This isn't what's going on here. With the exception of the very first scene of the teaser, there isn't a single scene that's just there to inform us about Grace. Instead, the scenes that are strongly about Grace also have story beats, often from both of the other story lines.

That is the notable thing about Miller's scenes, all the story threads seem to be woven into them at once.

Teaser
Take the four minute teaser. Miller introduces both storylines and gives us a great dose of Grace's character.

The show opens with Grace banging her married partner (C) . Next, between popping pills, boozing, burping and flashing the geezer next door (C ), Grace turns on the the tv and gets the first bits of information about the crime she's going to investigate (B).

The curtain introduces the A story; the man watching her is reflected in a car window, he has angel wings.

Act One
The act is made up of five sequences. Investigation, nephew, bar, manslaughter, Earl.

Almost every scene, touches on the three main threads of the episode: Grace's character (C ), the mystery of the week (B) and the whole God question (A).

In the first few scenes of the first sequence, the action services the B story. Grace meets fellow cops at the stockyards to flush out the suspect. The dialogue is all about Grace's character (C) . Then someone points out that one of the cows being auctioned-off have markings that look just like Jesus, which of course keeps God squarely in our minds (A).

Now put a pause on all the story stuff for a moment. At the 7 minute mark, Grace decks a lecherous cowboy and her partners engage in a good ol' chase scene that lasts to 7:45.

But Miller buttons it with Grace being Grace, hooting and hollering as she watches her partners get all muddy (C ).

The nephew sequence which follows services Grace's character (C ). Or does it move the mystery along (B)? We go in on the phone conversation with partner Ham, who updates her on the case and ends with Grace arranging to meet up with an ex-boyfriend who may know the suspect. In between, we learn that Grace just might be redeemable, but that she's certainly out of control when she takes her nephew and the girl he likes on the joy ride (C ). In other words, B beats bookend a C scene.

The bar scene continues the discussion about the case (B), but segues momentarily into a question of ethics (A) and then back to the case, even though Grace is very drunk(C).

From then on, it's all A story.

The Curtain
The final sequence opens with action; Grace driving drunk, hitting a guy and then realizing he's dead.

You could go out there. That would be a respectable curtain.

But Miller takes us further into her story with another jolt; Grace says "God help me" and the angel, Earl appears to say God sent him. Another respectable curtain.

But no…

Earl spreads his wings and transports Grace to a mountain top. It's a spectacular shot and a funny original scene that takes two sudden, emotional turns -- when Earl wraps Grace in his arms and she loves it and then again when he wants to know whether she's ready to turn her life over to God and then suddenly she's jolted back to into the darkness at the side of the highway.

That's one jam packed first act, that leaves you holding your breath for Act Two.

Saving Grace - Tonight on Showcase

2007-08-27T09:34:00.000-04:00

Showcase is airing the pilot of Saving Grace tonight, Monday August 27th at 10 p.m. If you're in Canada and haven't seen the show, watch it.

I've already written about it once, here, but I'm going to post about it again tomorrow. I'll focus on the structure of the first act and on how some of the scenes are put together and there's lots to learn.

So watch it and come back tomorrow (but I'll be posting late in the day because I'm on the road tomorrow).

Blood Ties

2007-08-22T10:39:00.001-04:00

Blood Ties aired in Canada at long last: mystery, monsters and one very hot vampire who appears shirtless a lot of the time. Excellent.
Blood Price, the pilot episode written by series creator Peter Mohan, is actually two one-hour episodes even though they aired together on Monday night. I know it's two one-hours because there's a three minute forty-one second scene at the 42:27 minute mark. That would be the teaser of the second episode. It's my habit to only break down one-hours, so if you'll forgive me, I'm going to ignore the second hour and focus my attention on the first.

The show features a short pre-title teaser followed by four acts that time out as follows:

Teaser: 3:08
Act One: 12:39
Act Two: 7:43
Act Three 9:07
Act Four 9:50

First shot: Toronto skyline at night shot from across the water.

This is a premise pilot that sets up the relationship between Vicky Nelson, private investigator and Henry Fitzroy, vampire. We also learn about Vicky's complicated relationship with her former policing partner, Mike Celluci.

The other main story line in the pilot is the mystery of the week.

In some ways this a familiar form. As in Veronica Mars and Burn Notice, the pilot is divided between a mystery of the week that buttons up nicely and gives us that satisfying episodic feel and the series' story which will continue and compels us to watch week after week.

But Mohan has an interesting twist on how he approaches both sides of the equation.

On the mystery side, Mohan follows not only the investigation but also the villain. In many mystery series, we see the crimes only from the detective's p.o.v. Starting right in the second scene of the teaser, we meet Norman, the villain (he's one of the villains anyway and the guy who calls the evil demon into action). This is great for cranking up the stakes and this storyline provides the scenes for every act breaks except the final curtain on Act Four.

On the premise side of the story, Vicky is introduced to us in the first scene of the teaser. As a result we see her as the central figure in the series and since she's a former cop turned private detective, we quite naturally follow her into the mystery. And since her ex-partner-ex-beau is the cop investigating the same crime his involvement is also organic.

But the third player -- Henry the vampire -- is a little trickier to pull into the story. Mohan introduces him in the third scene of act one. Like Vicky, his first scene is purely for character purposes and only in his second scene does he learn of the crime that he too begins to investigate. He's investigating because the crime looks like it was committed by a vampire and he's afraid that he'll be blamed.

By mid-way through Act One, we have two story lines that are independent investigations of the third story which features the crime unfolding. That puts all three on a collision course. There's Norman and his demon committing evil acts. Vicky in a reluctant partnership with Celluci investigating. And Henry the vampire, investigating the same crimes on his own.

Mohan nimbly holds the collision off until the closing moments of the fourth act when Henry drives the demon away and then Vicky attacks Henry to bring down the final curtain of the episode.

It's a cool and original structure.

Here's to God and Football and Living Large in Texas

2007-08-20T15:06:00.000-04:00

I never imagined I would like Friday Night Lights. A show about high school football in Texas?! I resisted until January of this year and once I'd seen the pilot, written by Peter Berg, I was hooked. I proceeded to binge on the series, watching the first 10 episodes in three days (three excellent days, might I add).

Watching the show -- for me at least -- is like traveling to some exotic destination. The entire world is foreign to me: teenage boys holding hands and dropping to one knee to pray, the football mania of the small town of Dillon and the incredible mental preparation that goes into building a football player.

I thought a lot about sports psychology while I was watching the first season of FNL. Writing is no less demanding on the psyche. Writing is a lonely affair and you need to believe in yourself and your abilities each day as you sit down at your keyboard to do battle with your story and your own fears.

So today, I'm borrowing some motivational words of wisdom spoken by Coach Eric Taylor in the pilot episode of FNL to fuel us through the day's writing.

TAYLOR
Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose.

TAYLOR
You've earned this: the right to win.
You put that in your head.

TAYLOR
Give all of us gathered here tonight the strength to remember that life is so very fragile. We are all vulnerable and we will all at some point in our lives fall. We will all fall. We must carry this in our hearts…that what we have is special. That it can be taken from us and that when it is taken from us we will be tested. We will be tested to our very souls. We will now all be tested. It is these times, it is this pain that allows us to look inside ourselves.

And finally from a drunken Tim Riggins to his teammates the night before the game:

RIGGINS
Let's touch God this time, boys.

Californication

2007-08-13T21:09:00.000-04:00

Californication written by Tom Kapinos (who ran Dawson's Creek in its fourth season) aired. You've seen it. Maybe you liked it. I know I did.

Let's look under the hood.

It is more a typical-episode pilot than a premise pilot. Hank bumbles through what seems to be his normal routine. But it is the beginning of an arced series. Maybe the meeting with Mia will set off a major storyline and then we can look back at this episode and say it was a premise pilot because he met Mia and that set up everything that followed. I'm filing this under typisode.

Timings
The episode is nearly 33 minutes with titles and credits and no commercial breaks which makes it longer than a half hour, by almost ten minutes but shorter than an hour by another ten.

The pretitles teaser is five minutes long and although it runs without commercials, we can feel an act break at 12:35 and another around 26:30, followed by a four minute third act.

Structure
The episode is held together by three story threads: Hank's relationship with his ex and daughter (A), his obsession with his novel and the movie based on it (B) and his sexual exploits (C). They are all intertwined and the plot/subplot breakdown doesn't do much for this show.

But it really is more organic to look at the episode as a series of vignettes, almost all of which with women. There are fourteen of these sequences (which don't really conform to the A,B,C breakdown I've imposed on them in brackets):

Teaser: the nun (C), the married woman (C)
Act 1: Karen (the ex) and Becca (the daughter) (A), the director's wife (B), Karen and Becca (A), a guy in a movie theatre (B), Mia in the bookstore (B/C)
Act 2: Karen and Becca's teacher (A), Hank's agent (B), Meredith the blind date (B meets C), the nameless bar girl (C), Karen and Becca (A)
Act 3: Karen and Mia (A meets C), Hank alone (A)

Act One is really mostly about his obsession with his novel-turned-movie. The naked woman his daughter finds in his bed is the movie's director. He goes to see the movie then he goes to see the novel in the bookstore.

Act Two tops and tails with beats about Becca acting out; the teacher's concern and her parents bursting into a party to carry her out. In between, Hank acts out, mouthing off to his blind date.

The opening and closing scenes bookend the story. At the top of the show he tells the nun:

HANK
I'm having what you might call a crisis of faith.
Put simply, I can't write.

In the final scene, his fingers twitch above the keyboard. On the screen, we see the letters appear F… U… C… K…

Opening shot
The show begins with the opening strains of "You Can't Always Get What You Want" playing over black. We fade in on a long lush drive, sprinklers going on either side and Porsch driving up it towards an impressive church. Or is it a cathedral?

Opening line
Hank address Jesus on the cross: "'Kay, big guy. You and me."

The Hooks
The show has a lot of sex scenes and outrageous moments:

Hank drops a cigarette in holy water.
A nun gives him a blow job, in front of Jesus. No nudity.
Hank and married woman talk about cunilingus. Nudity.
Hank's daughter comments on the hairless vagina.
Director's wife gets dresses. Nudity.
Mia rides Hank and punches him. Nudity.
Nameless girl in the bar rides Hank then offers herself up on her hands and knees. Nudity.
Hank finds out he slept with a sixteen year old.

Third Act Statement of Theme
At about the twenty minute mark, Hank is in conversation with his agent who points out Hank's prediliction for unavailable women. Hank tells "I'm disgusted with my life and myself but I'm not unhappy about that." Is this a statement of theme? Maybe.

Memorable Lines

BECCA
There's no hair on her vagina. Do you think she's okay?

NUN
Something tells me it's not going to suck itself, Hank.

HANK
So not only are you a cadavarous lay, you have bad
taste in movies.

Pilot Structure Part 2

2007-08-09T22:23:00.000-04:00

Here are three more techniques to keep in mind:

Sub-plot Free First Acts
A teaser or first act of a pilot can follow a single story line without introducing a single subplot. The teaser of the CSI pilot is almost all about one of the mysteries of the week. The seven minute teaser for Burn Notice, on the other hand, never strays from setting up the series premise. The mystery of the week didn't show up till halfway through the first act. The Skins teaser is all about Tony's character.

Story Clumps
Storylines often come in clumbs of 3, 4 or 5 beats in a row. The Wire has strings of five A-beats followed by three Bs that allow you to follow the consequences of an action. Act Three of the Veronica Mars pilot devotes half its beat to the Wallace-Weevil storyline. Half of Act Two of Jekyll is through Jackman's eyes, the other half through Hyde's.

Plots that Come in Late
A pilot can also introduce quite an important story line very late in the game. Think of Bubbles' entrance in the Wire. His storylines run through all four seasons of the Wire and he's an important player all through the first season, but he doesn't show up in the pilot until late in the third act. But then a rich little story develops around him, his young white side-kick and some bad counterfeit money. In CSI, Nick's D-story about the trick roll trickles in with four flimsy beats in the first three acts and the meat of the story coming in the four beats in the fourth act.

Pilot Structure Trends

2007-08-09T10:08:00.000-04:00

These are the structural trends emerging from the pilots I've read and watched:

Open long.
A lot of teases are running very long. Or scripts are eschewing teases altogether and leading off with titles followed by a long act one. Once you get the viewer tuned in, why give them a commercial and let them escape. Hang onto them as long as possible without giving them a break.

Act lengths aren't even.
There's usually at least one very short (9 page, for example) act. Sometimes, I see symmetry between the first and second halves of the show with acts 1 and 3 almost exactly the same length and acts 2 and 4 the same lengths. I never see all four acts equal.

State your theme in the third act.
Very often the series theme is spelled out in dialogue just as the conflict is rising to its apex in the third act. Isaac Ho pointed this out in a post on Script Enabler. I've found it too. It usually falls at the thirty minute mark which would be around page 40 in a 60 page script.

Go for character.
A pilot script can be rich in scenes that are only present to develop character and don't drive the story forward in any other way. Written well, they don't stop the action. Instead, they up the viewer's commitment to the series.

Do You Really Have to Save Her?

2007-08-03T17:42:00.000-04:00

I was excited that two recent pilots --Damages and Saving Grace -- feature female anti-heroes. What's more they're both of a certain age.

In an era with so many not-so-nice men (House, Tony Soprano, Vic Mackey, Tommy Gavin), it's great to finally see some shows built around edgy female characters.

I talked about Damages' Kate Hewes in a previous post. She's ruthless, powerful and unapologetic. Plus she has great clothes and hair.

Grace Hanadarko of Saving Grace, a series written and created by Nancy Miller and airing on TNT, has over-processed hair, an unquenchable sexual appetite and no qualms about sleeping with her married partner. She swears like a sailor, drives a beat-up Porsche and she carries a gun. Plus she has a mean right hook which she puts to good use when someone slimy hits on her (if they're not slimy, her clothes come right off).

(If you don't have TNT, you might be able to watch the pilot on their website, but you'll need Windows. I couldn't test it out because I have a Mac.)

Grace, played by Holly Hunter, is naked and in the middle of a sexual encounter when we first meet her.

Moments later (moments well spent, by the way, swilling Jack Daniels, smoking and burping), she's watching tv. The distraught father of a kidnapped child say that he knows the lord will bring his daughter home. Grace practically snort, "and then eliminate war and hunger." She's cynical too.

I was immediately madly in love with her. The character is a cop and watched her solve mysteries and abuse herself for as many seasons as they were willing to make the show.

Unfortunately, the show has a twist: an angel. Okay, he chews tobacco. But he's still an angel. And he wants to save Grace. Hence the title of the show.

(I was going to put a clip from Youtube here, but they all feature the angel and the redemption story line when what I wanted to show you is Grace acting badly, so I had to pass.)

I'm totally bummed out. We finally get a show built around a foul mouthed, sexually-in-control, remorseless woman and along comes the rep of some God who's not fond of boozing, cussing and fornication to clean her up.

What's that about?

I don't know. Maybe it'll all twist into John from Cincinnati territory. Maybe it'll turn out to be some quirky view of religion that won't offend me. Maybe it's going to turn out to be an important work that explores serious themes in a deep and meaningful way.

But come on.

Finally, a really fabulous bad girl with no regrets comes along. Do I really have to see her find religion? I wanted to watch her descent into hell.

I'm Sad To Report

2007-08-02T12:21:00.000-04:00

I finished watching Jekyll.

What can I say? The ending was a disappointment.

It starts so great. And it held me fast for four episodes.

But by episode five, I was asking "what?! what show is this?"

It's funny. In the pilot I loved the abrupt turns that kept taking you into new territory. I thought I knew what kind of show I was watching and then bang! I'd be somewhere else completely.

But when it started taking those sharp turns in episode 5? I didn't like it so much.

I did like the way the show twisted you around so that Hyde became the good guy. I'm always a fan of a show that changes your perspective on a character that way -- you start out hating them and then something is revealed that puts you on their side. And Moffat did that well.

Not only that, but the evolution of my feelings for Hyde was natural. It flowed right out of the first moment he appeared in the pilot when I wanted to like him. And by episode 5, Moffat gave me reason to.

But all the underpinnings of who Jackman is and where he came from and how he became Hyde, that just didn't ring true for me.

I think you should still watch the series, because there's lots of enjoyment to be had and lots of craft to admire and learn from. But be warned:

Great setup. Mediocre payoff.

Eek! A Security Leak

2007-08-01T08:38:00.000-04:00

Apparently, some pilots got leaked to the Internet.

TV Week reports that the list includes Bionic Woman, Pushing Daisies, Reaper, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Cavemen, Chuck and Lipstick Jungle.

Add Aliens in America...

...and Cane.

I guess Californication doesn't count because it's not network, but it's there too. And I suspect there may be more to come.

Good or bad thing?

Bill comes down pro.

The networks? I'm guessing con.

Moi? It's reality. Who needs to qualify it?

I'm only going to comment on the ones I really like in this space and only after the official air dates. But I will give you a head's up, so you can watch them before you read the post.

PVR Alert

2007-07-31T08:34:00.001-04:00

Californication premiers Monday August 13th at 10:30 pm on Showtime with a "typical episode" pilot written by Tom Kapinos.

Ignore all the promo video on YouTube, etc. Watch the episode fresh.

We'll talk the 14th.

Damages

2007-07-29T16:17:00.001-04:00

Just a few words about Damages, a new series on FX. The pilot was written by series creators and showrunners Todd A Kessler & Glenn Kessler & Denial Zelman.

I'm still being treated for the scratch marks on head from watching Mad Men and the Damages characters offer a sharp contrast. Interestingly, Todd A Kessler, one of the Damages creator/writers is a former Sopranos writer like Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner.

Before continuing to read, let me warn you that spoilers lie ahead. I can't talk about shows in the way I want to without giving away important plot points. Even my haiku breakdown of Viva Laughlin gave away a lot. So from here on, let it be known, I'm going to give stuff away. If you care, go read the script or see the show before you read.

Damages is built around the character of high stakes litigator Patty Hewes (Glenn Close). Hewes comes out of the box as ruthless and ballsy. Her character is immediately recognizeable to us as viewers and unlike Mad Men's characters, behaves in a way we can predict. There are a couple of twists along the way, but we're not left asking wtf? Instead, we smile and accept her behavour, seeing that she is more extreme than we expected, but the behaviour fits the pattern we expect from the character.

In the first sequence that introduces her, Patty uses a combination of trickery, rhetoric and emotion to force the other lawyer in a case to cave to her will. When he realizes that she's tricked him to the tune of $150,000,000, he responds by saying that if she were a man, he'd "kick the living dog shit out of" her. Patty responds:

PATTY
If you were a man, I'd be worried.

(Watch for the line in the video below. Close's delivery is perfect.)

There is one false move along the way, a scene that bugged me and nagged at me all through my viewing of the pilot.

Ellen Parsons, the young lawyer turns down her interview with Hewes to go to her sister's wedding. Patty turns up at the wedding to Ellen's disbelief. And then ends up hiring her as a result of their little ladies room chat.

I didn't buy Patty's reason for turning up at the wedding ("Because, kiddo, you're the first person to turn me down"). And I didn't buy her sentimentality in hiring the ingenue.

It wasn't a "huh?" moment like the character turns in Mad Men. It just didn't feel like something Patty would do. Why the heart-warming second act moment from the hard as nails anti-hero?

The answer came at the end of the episode. It wasn't a soft moment from Patty, it was a highly calculated move by a master maniulator. It wasn't out of character at all. We know Patty's manipulative from the teaser. And by the end of the episode, we learn how truly manipulative she is. The act of going to the wedding was just another one of her manipulations.

The action fits perfectly into the character as we come to expect her to behave.

The characters of Mad Men challenge us as viewers by refusing to act in ways allow us to understand them. They take us by surprise and leaving us unsettled. The Patty Hewes character surprises us too. By how far she's willing to go. But though I may not have predicted her behaviour, it perfectly fulfills my expectations for the character.

Mad Men - Preview

2007-07-25T22:11:00.001-04:00

Advertizing is based on one thing. Happiness.

Mad Men

2007-07-25T21:46:00.000-04:00

I'm predisposed to love this show.

People I like tell me it's great.

Plus, my dad was an ad man in the 50s and 60s. He wasn't a Madison Avenue type. His office was on Peel Street in Montreal. He worked his way up from copywriter through the executive ranks until he was running the Canadian branch of a big American agency. So we saw some fringes of the world that the series is about and lived through the Canadian version of the same scene.

The pilot episode of Mad Men is entitled Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and was written by series creator Matthew Weiner. You remember his writing credit from The Sopranos.

It is not a premise pilot. It doesn't set up the world. Although it's Peggy's first day at the firm, it doesn't show us the world through her eyes. The main characters are just going about their ordinary business and we have no problem jumping right into the story with them.

The stakes aren't high and there isn't a whole lot of forward momentum in the story. The curtains aren't big turn arounds or cliff hangers.

It's a character study. An exploration of a world and a theme.

The show has fabulous art direction and it looks fantastic.

Plus the writing is incredibly skilled. Weiner is particularly adept with his theme. He recreates the 60s flawlessly and his characters are unusually complex. My only complaint is that I failed to find an emotional connection with the characters.

But the fact that they left me cold might just be an expression of theme.

Advertizing boils it all down to a digestible message.

Which is kind of like what we as television writers sometimes do with our characters. We simplify them, reduce them to a few adjectives or a simple world view. Their clearly defined needs guide their actions. The audience understands why they do what they do and can even predict their next move. Or at the very least, recognize it as logical.

The characters of Mad Men are not predictable or logical.

Check out DMc's post. The character turns left him scratching his head.

Don Draper, the ad man who fronts the cast of characters, asks Midge, the smart, independent and sexually available career woman to marry him. He likes smart women, we conclude.

Then he dises Miss Menkin, the smart, independent and possibly sexually available business woman saying "I'm not going to sit here and let a woman talk to me this way." We must have been wrong. Don hates smart women.

Later, Draper goes home to his sexually available babe of a wife and a child he adores.

Huh?

He's a devoted husband and father?! But he asked Midge to marry him.

The character is a bundle of contradictions. You don't know what he's going to do next.

He refuses to be simplified into a neat, digestible message.

He's messy and complicated and conflicted. Like real people.

Like the world.

Not simple and digestible. Not "healthier" or "toasted" or "finger licking good" like advertizers would have us believe.

This is Matthew Weiner weaving theme deftly into every element of his show.

What is his theme? I thought of Isaac Ho's theory that theme is expressly stated in a pilot's third act at approximately the 30 minute mark. So I went back to the 30 minute mark.

It's the scene at the Lucky Strike pitch meeting. Draper has been struggling with the campaign throughout the episode and here is the big pitch meeting. Draper's dry. He's got nothing. Pete, the upstart kid who's after his job, is at least in there throwing out ideas even they do fall flat. The client gets up to leave. Suddenly Draper has an idea. He pitches a slogan, the client is intrigued but unsure.

Then, at 32:11, he has this speech:

DRAPER
Advertizing is based on one thing. Happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard that screams with reassurance that whatever you're doing it's okay. You are okay.

Weiner thinks we are not okay. His characters are not happy or free from fear, but they are desperately clinging to the hope that they are okay.

Advertizing is based on one thing. Happiness.

Look at the opening titles sequence -- the first thing you see in this teaserless pilot. An executive walks into his office, puts down his briefcase, his window is open.

Suddenly, he is falling and falling and falling down the side of the skyscraper. Advertizing images are reflected in the windows as he falls toward certain death.

Did he jump? Was he pushed? Is he dreaming?

He doesn't hit the ground. He's sitting comfortably -- king of the world -- in his big executive chair.

(My dad had a chair just like that, by the way. And his office on Peel, looked an awful lot like Draper's.)

This isn't a show about happiness. It's about how advertizing's framing of our world makes us unhappy. It's about illusion and image and deception. And how nothing is as simple as advertizing.

Not Weiner's characters nor the relationships between them.

Other characters are as illusive as Draper.

I had no idea what Peggy the secretary was thinking as she settled into her new job. She's passive in most of the scenes. When the kid is crude in her presence, she says nothing. Joan, who runs the secretarial pool, tells her to put a paper bag over herself, examine naked self in the mirror and be brutally honest. And she says, "I always try to be honest." Then she goes out and gets herself a prescription for the Pill.

Huh? Where's the pattern? Who is she? Why isn't Weiner simplifying her for me so I can digest her nice and easily? Oh shit, I think he wants me to think.

The relationships also refused to lay down neatly into expected patterns.

Don chews Pete for mistreating Peggy, warning him that if he acts like that no one will like him. A scene or two later Pete admits that Don is right about him and asks him to be his mentor.

In any other pilot, there would be a handshake and a bonding of the characters we're going to follow for the series.

Instead, Don refuses to shake and as Pete heads down the hall he mutters "fuck you" under his breath.

Boss and secretary don't have a heart-warming, we're-going-to-be-a-family-for-the-run-of-the-series moment either. Don both chews her out and rebuffs her sexual advances.

This isn't neat commercial story telling. This is complicated, messy and unexpected. The antithesis of the reductionism of advertizing. And the most of formulaic of network television shows.

I think part of what attracts Denis and others to this show is the resonance of theme through it.

It's about something.

And the thing it's about is interesting and very relevant to our lives right now.

Weiner has something to say. And this pilot makes me want to keep listening.

Time + Emotion - Jekyll Part 2

2007-07-24T15:27:00.000-04:00

I finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and am now back to tv. I have decided to wait for the final episode of Jekyll before watching ep 5. I'm looking forward to the mini-binge and dreading saying good-bye to the show.

Meanwhile, so much is building up that I may have to give up sleep to keep up (thanks for the tip, Bill). But before I comment on Mad Men (omg, Denis, I can't wait) and John from Cincinnati (Will is keeping the discussion warm), I have to finish with the pilot of Jekyll.

I wanted to discuss the rising tension in the pilot, but my first post on it got way too long. So here's what I found when I broke it down:

Time is an essential part of how tension is built in this show. Not surprisingly then, the first shot of the series is of a ticking clock. It doesn't create tension for us yet, but it will when we form an emotional connection with Tom Jackman, the series lead. In Jeckyll, time plus emotion equals tension.

The tease and first act are fairly flat in terms of jeopardy, but by the end of the first act, we've begun to feel something for Jackman. So Hyde's impending appearance (time) in front of Jackman's wife (emotion) creates an exciting act break.

Then the tension drops again for the top of act two.

Two sequences into the act, we learn that Hyde is due in twenty minutes. Still Jackman is determined to pursue a clue in the mystery of who is following him. This leads us into a long mid-act sequence of tension that keeps turning. Each turn seems to crank the stakes a little higher.

And when the knife is literally at Jackman's throat and we feel like things can't get any worse, Hyde appears. The heat keeps rising.

The sequence which follows is long, funny, tense and violent. The tension here is the product of a couple of marriages of opposites. Toward Hyde himself, I feel both a revulsion and fascination. He is funny and good-looking, but vicious and the nemesis of Jackman with whom I've finally bonded. And then there's the situation. We want this bullying kid dealt the blow he deserves but we know that wanting that is wrong. We sit at the edge of our seats anticipating that violence.

And after it comes, after this long long mid-second act sequence of high tension, Moffat brings us relief in the form of a drink at the local pub, a good-looking woman and some comedy.

Even though, he plays the rest of the act and most of the following one for comedy, the sense of danger boils beneath the surface. There have been too many surprises. We've felt contradictory emotions, rooted for evil (however quietly) and learned to like Jackman. So here we are on edge and still, the third act curtain is a surprise as it cranks the stakes way way up.

Now Jackman's worst fears are realized; Hyde's next target may not be some (semi-) deserving punk. This time it may be the innocents.

Most of the fourth act plays with time and toys with our emotions in order to achieve another long, agonizing sequence of tension.

But when we finally have the answers that relieve that tension, Moffat turns up the heat one last time. The dams break on Jackman's anger and we realize that the rest of the series will be a battle between the two men who inhabit the same body.

What we have is a long long section of tension in the middle of the long long second act. And then a sense of growing danger held at bay with comedy through the rest of act two right up to the third act curtain. The fourth act is one long agonizingly drawn out sequence of tension and fear until almost the end.

Thinking back, it's that long second act sequence of action and drama that bonded me to the series. The plot kept turning and the stakes kept getting higher. It was a powerful viewing experience and left me dying for the next installment.

If Jackman Gets a Hard On, I'm It: Jekyll

2007-07-17T16:39:00.000-04:00

Perhaps I have sufficiently conveyed to you my admiration of Jekyll. Now down to business:

The pilot episode, written by Steven Moffat, is laid out in a teaser and four acts and as Anonymous pointed out, it's the pilot for a short-lived miniseries and not for an ongoing series. For that reason it's quite different than many of the other pilots I've posted about.

No, it doesn't apply to what most Canadian writers are doing to respond to the demand (?) from our broadcasters. Our marketplace wants stand alone episodes of unarced series. Miniseries are out of fashion here.

But maybe this is what we should be doing. Maybe an intense six part series is exactly what we should be doing. It seems to me that our audience could commit to a whole six hours of programming. And it's certainly the kind of event television that would fulfill cultural mandates (if those still exist under the current government); drawing the audience into a shared experience. But never mind all that.

Even though this pilot sets up a miniseries, there are very specific lessons to take away from it and to add to my writing toolbox.

I'm going to focus on these things:
the structure, which shines a light on a new part of this world in every act,
the way the show slowly pulls us from a position of skeptical detachment into one of full emotional connection to the lead character
and, (in my next post) the way the tension builds through the episode.

I'm not going to break the whole thing down, beat by beat, but instead I'll talk more about the shape of the acts,.

The episode has a short Teaser, which I described in a previous post, followed by four acts.

What the Acts Do
Each of these five acts unveils new aspects of the world of Jekyll.

In the Teaser, we learn the rules by which Tom Jackman co-exists with the as-yet-unnamed entity who shares his body.

Act One reveals Jackman's life and the huge sacrifice he's made because of Hyde. We get a hint that the rules between them are breaking down.

Act Two shows us Jackman investigating what he calls his unprecedented condition. Half way through the act, Hyde finally makes his first startling appearance. And now we begin to learn about Hyde's life and his attitude toward Jackman.

By Act Three, we learn Jackman's back story and are introduced to a theory about Hyde's existence.

In Act Four, we learn how big the stakes really are for Jackman and it becomes clear that Hyde is going to fight him for total control of his body and his life.

The act by act turns are quite spectacular when you're watching. Not only does more and more of the world get revealed, but the show begins to reveal itself. The special effects change, increase, intensify. And you are dragged further and further from reality as the fantastic elements of the series are slowly revealed.

And your emotional relationship to the show and characters changes as well.

First Shot, First Line
The show opens on a ticking clock.

The first line comes from Jackman, referring to Hyde:

JACKMAN

He's due at midnight. He's usually punctual.

Act Lengths and The Curtains
Tease: 4 minutes
Act One: 6 minutes
Act Two: 20 minutes
Act Three: 12 minutes
Act Four: 91/2 minutes

The Teaser ends on an image of Hyde's eyes popping open. It's an intriguing moment, rather than one of jeopardy.

Act One ends with a dip to black as Jackman's car pulls away and we are quite certain that Hyde is in the driver's seat (although we don't see him yet). Again, the curtain is more of mystery than it is of danger.

The long, long and very exciting second act ends with a startling display of Hyde's powers which prove that he is not anywhere close to a normal human being. Now we're weirded out and we can't look away, but it isn't a cliff-hanger; nothing is hanging in the balance, except what is at stake for the entire series: Jackman's life (and maybe reality as we know it).

Act Three ends with an enormous cliffhanger. Characters we've come to know may or may not be dead or injured and innocent lives may be in danger. The stakes have gotten huge.

The episode ends with Jackman declaring war on Hyde. The stakes are huge, but the events in this episode are clearly complete. We have been reminded of the continuing story threads earlier in the act, but as the curtain falls what we have before us on the screen are Jackman's intense emotions, his determination to protect what is dear to him from the other man inside his body. It is not a hard cliffhanger like the one at the end of the Burn Notice pilot or any episode of Heroes. Instead it's an ending that closes off a story but drives you toward the next beginning.

The Viewer's Emotional Thru-Line
The teaser introduces us to Dr Tom Jackman and Katherine Reimer, the psychiatric nurse he's hired as his minder. Watching the tease, we share Reimer's detached p.o.v. and feel maybe even more than a little skeptical about the drama Jackman's laying on. Even as the act ends, with the startling moment when Hyde's bloodshot eyes pop open, we don't feel any sense of danger, just clinical interest. We definitely want to see what's coming next, but our emotions haven't been sucked into it yet.

In Act One, we meet Jackman's family, see that his wife and kids love him and the agony he feels at his forced separation from them. His emotion brings in ours. By the end of the act, when he seems in physical pain as he tries to prevent Hyde from making an unscheduled appearance in front of his wife, we are sympathetic toward Jackman, even if we aren't quite sure whether his fear is warranted.

Act Two continues to build Jackman's reality and our empathy for him. Then comes the sequence when he visits the private detective and suddenly we are in Jackman's shoes with him. It's all as new and bewildering to him as it is to us. It's taken the tease plus one and half acts to get us to the point where we're seeing the world through Jackman's eyes; what a perfect time to put him in physical danger.

Boom. Hyde bursts out.

HYDE
First fag of the day always hits the spot.

And Moffat toys with our emotions here. Because we hate this punk with the knife who's been bullying Jackman and want to see him put in his place. So yay for the appearance of the cavalry in the form of Hyde. And he's funny. And larger than life. And maybe, kind of appealing. But out of control. Too violent. Scary.

And what do those special effects signify? We're not quite ready to accept the implications.

And by the end of the act, the jury's still out on Hyde. He's a complicated character and we're not sure how to feel. But one thing's certain; reality has slipped away and we're in a world of unprecedented possibilities.

We're already exhausted by the time the curtain goes up on Act Three and so is Jackman. Now that Moffat has revealed to us how distant from our reality he's prepared to take us, he's ready to give us some back story. We fully appreciate why Jackman has that deer in the headlights look about him and know that his level of anxiety is justified. In fact, we begin to suspect that maybe he's not quite fearful enough. And that's when we get hit with the first truly scary act break.

Act Four is a web of filmic tension, the sweet agony of horror. Along with Jackman, we know that worst may have happened. We want to look, we don't want to look. The identification with Jackman is complete. And when he freaks out we know he's justified. And when he finally declares war on Hyde, we applaud him.

The Third Act Statement of Theme
Isaac Ho, over at the Script Enabler, tells us to look for a statement of theme in the third act and here it is about the 41 minute mark:

CALLENDAR
How often in this world does the sun rise on something completely
new? And how often do we mistake a miracle for a monster?

That's enough for today. Next time, the patterns of escalating tension through this pilot.

Good News

2007-07-16T17:12:00.000-04:00

According to Rob Salem in today's Toronto Star, Jekyll is premiering here in Canada on Showcase on August 29th. Set your PVR now!

Coming Up

2007-07-14T14:28:00.000-04:00

Of the pilots I've read or watched so far in 2007, my five faves, each of which I've written about however briefly:

1. Jekyll

2. Skins

3. The Riches

4. Reaper (script)

5. Friday Night Lights

I am in the process of breaking Jekyll down. I'll be writing about it next (I hope) so watch it soon if you can. What I love so much about it is that every act offers new surprises. The show keeps unfolding, taking unexpected turns, becoming something new.

The Riches pilot is quite similar to Jekyll in this respect. So I may write about it right aftter I finish with Jekyll -- for comparison purposes. Watch that too.

Then there's Friday Night Lights, which has a very unusual and successful structure. So doing a breakdown of it is also on my agenda. Especially since I recently came into possession of the script.

Also on my pilot script reading list:
Swingtown
Aliens in America
Bionic Woman
Miss Guided
New Amersterdam
Terminator
K-Ville
Carpoolers

And on my pilot watching list:
Hill Street Blues
Slings and Arrows
The Shield
NYPD Blue
Eureka

Veronica Mars

2007-07-09T21:09:00.001-04:00

Burn Notice (BN) made me want to go back and look at my notes on the Veronica Mars (VM) pilot written by series creator Rob Thomas. I think I've broken down the show at least twice and I've certainly watched many times. I've also read the script which is quite different that the produced episode and avaible on Rob Thomas's website.

The episode of Veronica Mars I'm referring to in this post is the extended pilot that comes on the DVD of the first season. Like the broadcast version of the first episode of BN, it runs longer than a normal hour.

Compared to Burn Notice
There's a lot of similarities between the shows these pilots set up. Most importantly, they are both shows that will feature a complete mystery every week and will tantalize you with some shocking detail about a larger season long mystery. Both shows a lot of narration and neither takes itself too seriously.

Both pilots are premise pilots.

But the screenwriters went about setting up their formats very differently. BN set up the series premise in the teaser and didn't get to the weekly mystery B-story till mid-way through the second act. VM gets to the weekly mystery right off the bat and gives us ever so teensy a clue about the premise.

Beats
Whereas I didn't dare give you the beat count for BN because my count was so ridiculously large that I decided it was better to ignore it. I'd like to stick with the theory that an hour has somewhere between 40 and 45 beats and ignore any sample that contradicts me. (You should know that in case you think I'm a reliable source on anything, because I'm not.)

I got 44 beats for VM. I broke it down into five story lines. Four of them are arcing lines that will play out over the season and one is the weekly mystery.

(Here's the convention I'm using for lettering the storylines in a premise plot. The A-story is always the larger arcing storyline (A for Arc, get it?). Chances are, when you're writing an episode of the series further on down the season, the weekly mystery will be the A-story and the arcing longer story will drop down in importance to a B- or a C-. But with a premise pilot, the arc is usually the most important story you're telling.

I will designate the weekly or episode story -- the one that's going to give this episode it's satisfying ending -- the B-story.

The tough thing for today's purposes is that VM had more than one arcing story. So for today, those other stories are going to be C, D and E. )

The five story lines:
A. Who killed Lily Kane? - 16 beats
B. Weevil's war on Wallace. - 16 beats
C. Who raped Veronica Mars? - 2 beats
D. Why did Duncan Kane dump Veronica? - beats
E. Where's Mom? - 2 beats
Char. Character moments - 6 beats

Whether C through E are really stories or mere runners or really part of the A-story is debatable, but that's how I did it.

The episode uses a fair amount of flashback. I have indicated in brackets (fb) where it occurs. (The whole first and half the second act are actually one long flashback from the teaser, but I am not including that in my FB designation.)

Here's my breakdown:

TEASER:
A, Char, B

(more after the video of the teaser)....

ACT ONE - 12 beats:
B, Char, Char, D (fb), B (fb), B, Char (fb), Char, A, B, A, A (fb)

ACT TWO - 9 beats
A, B, A (fb), A, A (fb), A, B, C (fb), B

ACT THREE - 12 beats
E, E (fb), B, B, A, Char, A, B, B, B, B, A

ACT FOUR
A, B, C (fb), B, B, B, Char, B, Char, B

Structure
There are lots of clustered story beats, particularly when it comes to the B-story.

Act One: Lots of character up front with a focus on the B-story and a burst of A at the end.

The nine beat second act is short and almost entirely devoted to the A-story, with just two little B beats to keep it alive.

Act Three is the same length as One and is mostly B-story with a little A sprinkled through. The two E beats at the beginning are very strong character moments that set up the story about Veronica's missing mother (Logan teases Veronica and Duncan stops him and a flashback to mom leaving).

Act Four has a lot of B with a couple of character beats interspersed and A beats book ending the act.

Curtains
Like BN, the act curtains aren't moments of extraordinarily high stakes:

The act break for the Teaser comes after Veronica's car is surrounded by a not-that-tough-looking motorcycle gang. Weevil (who we're just meeting, remember and could, possibly be evil) asks "trouble, miss?"

The first act curtains with Veronica's memory of her dad trying to send Celeste Kane's husband to jail.

The second act ends with Jake coming out of the Camelot Motel as Veronica snaps pictures.

The third act is the most dramatic of them all: Veronica discovers that the car from outside the Camelot Motel is registered to her mother.

And then the big moment of jeopardy at the end of the show that is designed to pull you back next week: Veronica arrives back at the motel room, but her mother isn't there.

Why It Works
Of course what happens between the curtains -- a missing mother, a dead cheerleader, a rape -- is so juicy, you don't need the high stakes curtains.

Plus Rob has taken the time to build a great cast of characters that are well drawn from word go, especially the title character and he devotes plenty of episode time to develop them and let you get to know them.

Selma and Patty Will Love It: Burn Notice

2007-07-04T21:49:00.000-04:00

If you're doing an arced series, you pretty much have to write a premise pilot script.

Burn Notice, written by series creator Matt Nix, was indeed a premise pilot, setting up the mystery story that the series will unravel over its season; why covert operative Michael Weston got served with the eponymous burn notice and his life as a spy terminated.

The series seems to be doing a Veronica Mars thing. Each week the show will dole out a few tantalizing tidbits about Weston's termination and maybe even end (as it does in the pilot) with a juicy cliffhanger relate to this long story. But in addition there will be a complete (and hopefully satisfying) plot delivered from beginning to end in the episode.

The show, if you haven't seen it, is a kind of MacGyver-Magnum PI cross with a little Fugitive thrown in. A wise cracking ex-spy with a roll of duct tape and heart of gold helps the underdog all the while trying to figure out why he got burned. There's a fair amount of action but played for comedy. And there is a lot of voice-over narration as Michael gives us the play-by-play on his life which I realized as I watched helps us to understand how all the cool MacGyverisms work.

It's really interesting to look at how the pilot sets up the premise and at the same time delivers the episodic plot.

The first thing to note is that the episode ran just over 65 minutes without any commercials. A seven minute plus tease ran in advance of the series titles, followed by what appeared to be four acts (hard to tell without those commercial markers). The act breaks seem to fall at the 24, 32 and 45 minute marks, with the final 22 minutes playing out without interruption.

The act curtains were soft compared to some, possibly because Nix knew he wouldn't have commercial breaks he had to hold onto his audience through. Or maybe it's just that they're comedy act breaks, not designed to build the jeopardy and tension.

The first curtain, at the end of the teaser, comes as our hero, Michael Weston, escapes danger in Nigeria and passes out on a plane. The second is Weston screaming into a pillow after having to face his mother. This is a character beat -- big tough double black belt can face anything except mom. -- rather than a moment of tension in the story. Act Three ends at the end of a day, a date has ended not too well and a villain dispatched rather effectively and it's time for bed. Act Four begins the next morning (I think this is the act break, I can't swear to it). The final curtain at the episode's end is the first cliffhanger, a suggestion that something weird and possibly sinister is at play in the long story and that strong invitation to come back next week to find out what.

Let's look now, at how the various subplots lay out.

To my reckoning there were five story threads. The A is the longer story: the mystery of why Michael got burned combined with the more functional tale of how he's dealing it with it. The B-story is the mystery of the week, involving Javier, a rich guy's servant who's being framed for robbing the rich guy. The C involves Michael's new apartment and the pain-in-the-ass drug dealer living downstairs. Then there's a runner about Michael's mother which I'm calling the M-story. And finally, there's a heartwarming mini-story about Javier's son; the K-story.

The teaser is all A story. We meet Michael the spy at work in Nigeria. In the middle of a dicey situation, he gets word that there's a burn notice out on him. He's surrounded by enemies with big guns and suddenly no one's backing him up. With wits, a little violence and a cool car chase that ends in a comedic twist, he escapes. But not without a few broken ribs and possibly a concussion. He passes out on a plane.

The first half of Act One sticks with the A, updating us on what's happened since he left Nigeria and showing us Michael dealing with the implications of being burned which involves some jeopardy -- for example he has no money anymore, the FBI are following him and his mother knows he's in Miami. The seven A-story beats that open Act One also introduce us to a couple of characters who will be his sidekicks, ex-girlfriend Fiona and ex-spy, current lush Sam.

And then we come to the B-story, which is developed in four quick beats which introduce us to the three main players: Javier, his rich boss and the boss's security guy.

Next comes a single beat of the C-story in which Michael moves into his new apartment over a disco and his landlord tells him about the bad ass drug dealer living downstairs. The scene also includes some information about Michael's career as a spy in which we learn how capable and amazing he was at his job, to make the comedic contrast with the next scene.

And to end the act, the first M beat, the phone call from mom (we can hear her voice) which drives big Mr. Tough-guy spy to scream into a pillow.

Act Two opens with a scene that combines another M-beat with an A-story beat. I think it's one of the funniest and cleverest scenes in the episode. Michael is driving his nagging mother to a doctor's appointment as he tries to shake his FBI tail.

This is followed by another quick A-story beat, a C-story beat and one more A beat. Then a cluster of 3 Bs, plus the introduction of the K-runner and finally, a C-beat to round off the act.

So the second act, keeps all the story lines in play, but like the first act, clusters the B beats close together, moving us through that story quickly and efficiently.

Act Three begins with an A beat, a little C-moment and then a cluster of three B beats, a K, then three more B beats. Then comes a scene in which Michael goes to dinner with his ex Fiona, which gives us some character and back story, reminds us of the A story and updates B a bit. The act ends with the C-story once again.

The final and very long fourth act opens with the B story and then settles into the C for a couple of beats and big MacGyver move that wraps up the C-story. Then it's time to get back to the B for two beats, make a quick visit to mom and then an action and MacGyver sequence of three beats that are there more for their thrills and coolness than because they drive the B or K stories forward. Then come two K beats in which the spy teaches the kid to overcome bullies.

Next we go to the A story for a couple of beats and then three more beats of action and MacGyverisms to bring the B story to a conclusion.

Finally, a scene that acts like a tag in the way it adds that extra ending to the B- and K-stories. And the final A story beat that leaves us hanging from the cliff waiting for next week.

Throughout the episode, we see clusters of scenes that drive particular stories forward. Only the C really drops in in single installments and that too needs a concentrated section at the top of the fourth act to get real momentum.

Sometimes, we think we need to start all the plot lines near the beginning of a show and then interweave them throughout, going back and forth with regularity. The more shows I break down, the more I see how wrong that is. Stories seem to play out nicely when you devote a few consecutive scenes to them, even most of an act. And you can leave another story thread hanging for quite a while.

Burn Notice didn't have a lot of jeopardy, sexual tension nor did it have high stakes curtains, but it was an engaging hour that kept you watching with humour, story, action and some great duct tape sequences. I'll watch it again, not because I'm dying to know why he was burned, but because it's fun to watch.

Life on Mars Times Two

2007-06-28T11:47:00.001-04:00

I've just finished reading the two pilot scripts for Life on Mars. One was the 2005 "Amended Pink" draft of the British original, written by co-creators Tony Jordan, Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharoah. The other was the 2007 first draft of the American remake written by David E Kelley and Stu Moss.

("Amended Pink" sounds like one of those drafts producers like to get for free, the revised second draft or the first draft polish.)

The two scripts are incredibly similar. Character names, descriptions and the entire story line of the pilot are the same in both. Many scenes are identical, but for the removal of the heavy British slang in the original, an updating for the technology (blackberries and Google Earth) and some streamlining of the story (which is quite effective for such a small touch).

Life on Mars, if you don't know, is the story of a modern day cop who somehow finds himself back in 1972. I had seen some episodes of the British original but it never grabbed me too much. The dilemma of being back in time was interesting, but I found it emotionally bleak. And emotions that I didn't think were earned. There's a lot of cops punching cops without much build up and men and women getting attracted to each other rather quickly and without reason. It seemed to me at the time.

I may or may not have sort of fast forwarded through a few episodes to try to find out if Sam got back to the future but by now, I don't even remember. I just didn't connect with the story emotionally and didn't end up committing.

But reading the script, I was much much more sucked in oddly. In fact, I read the British version first, the produced version of which I hadn't particularly enjoyed. On paper, I felt the jeopardy and was pulled along with the momentum and emotion of the story which hadn't happened when I watches it. There are a few moments which still don't ring true for me but I enjoyed the read.

The Americanized version is an even faster read, because some of the sub-plotting is gone. But what remains is very similar right down to scene structure and plenty of the dialogue.

I guess the point is very little about this premise needed changing for it to work in the American market. Or maybe that's wrong, because I read that the ABC version of the series is on hold.

Below, a two part video interview with the creators of the original series in which they tell how every broadcaster in the country turned them down, sometimes more than once.

The writers talk about creating the show.

Reaper Pilot Script

2007-06-26T11:41:00.001-04:00

I love Reaper. I love it. It's written by Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters. What I read is an unnumbered draft dated in December and is clearly not a production draft. No scene numbers. I had to count them: 45ish (accounting for my margin of error). A fast fun read with lots of laughs setting up what looks like a very fun series.

It's a premise pilot. And a terrific one at that.

And it has a measly little three page teaser (which I personally think they should lose, because why start on a fantasy sequence inside a computer game when the first act is so great and has such a great curtain that no viewer in his right mind would change the channel).

The story that the episode tells is funny and original. The characters are precise, their dialogue sharp. There are several action sequences which manage to be simultaneously comedic and cool. And what a great premise.

Here are some stats:
66 pages
Teaser plus five acts.

Teaser: 3 pages
Act 1: 16 ¾ pages
Act 2: 7 pages
Act 3: 11 ¼ pages
Act 4: 8 ¼ pages
Act 5: 18 pages

You'll note that the act lengths are very uneven. That's because they are situated where the best curtains are.

The script is written in a nice breezy way with a fair amount of action interspersed with the dialogue. In fact, quite rare is the page without 4, 5, 6 lines of action and frequently there is a lot more. There are at least 19 pages in which there is either more action than dialogue or there are approximately equal amounts of each.

I hope to write more about this one when I've had a chance to reread it and digest it.

Act One curtain.

The script is written in a nice breezy way with a fair amount of action interspersed with the dialogue. In fact, quite rare is the page without 4, 5, 6 lines of action and frequently there is a lot more. There are at least 19 pages in which there is either more action than dialogue or there are approximately equal amounts of each.

I hope to write more about this one when I've had a chance to reread it and digest it.

Viewing Report

2007-06-26T09:56:00.001-04:00

I'm in possession of a second episode of Jekyll. I haven't watched it yet. I'm going to save a few and them binge. Don't you find tv is better that way? You immerse yourself in a show.

I don't want to watch tv the way they dole it out: in weekly installment. Imagine trying to read a novel that way. You have seven or eight books on the go and you read one chapter of each every week. Okay, maybe I've been known to do that.

But I watched 10 hours of Friday Night Lights in three days in January and that was fabulous. And I had similar The Riches and The Tudors binged this spring (although I never finished either series, my interest seems to have dwindled). Dirt was excellent binge viewing. I don't know if I would have liked it so much if I would have had to wait. I slurped up four seasons of The Wire in a couple of months and then watched many of them over again. This is the way to watch tv, I think.

Anyway, I haven't watched the third John from Cincinnati either, but I am still willing to invest in it after episode two. Again, I'll build up a critical mass before digging back in.

I did finish watching Durham County, which was a really impressive creation written by Laurie Finstad-Knizhnik. Well done from beginning to end and proof that there's hope for us yet. (It would have been even better if I'd watched all the episodes at once, which I may yet do.)

And I caught the pilot episode of The Flight of the Conchords, playing on HBO and here in Canada on TMN (catch it on demand). HBO describes the series on their website:

Flight of the Conchords follows the trials and tribulations of a two man, digi-folk band from New Zealand as they try to make a name for themselves in their adopted home of New York City.

Not a setup pilot by the way. It almost starts in the middle of a sentence.

The series is created by James Bobin, Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie with the pilot written by James Bobin and Jemaine Clement. James Bobin, by the way, wrote on the Ali G show and helped to create the character of Borat. There are some comedy chops behind this series.

What makes the show unusual is that the characters break into music video every now and then. The lyrics made me laugh out loud quite a few times, so I'm including a sample.

Setup Pilot Versus Typical Episode

2007-06-24T23:21:00.000-04:00

Jaime J Weinman, in his blog TV Guidance, recently discussed what I'm doing here and then dove-tailed into a broader discussion of "premise" or "setup" pilot versus the "typical episode" premise. He makes good arguments on both sides from a viewer's perspective.

But if you're a Canadian screenwriter trying to get a show on the air, take it from me: forget the premise pilot. Start your first script further down the line. Jump in. Write the show as it's going to be in the other twelve episodes of the first season..

My reasoning has less to do with the satisfaction of writing it or the entertainment of the audience. It's just practical. You have a premise for a series, you have to test it out. A set up pilot does not help you (or the development execs) understand how your characters are going to act week to week, episode to episode. You aren't testing out the premise as a story telling vehicle, you're just setting up a story telling vehicle.

From a writing point of view, this isn't easy. It's hard to launch yourself into this world you're creating and start telling typical stories. As a writer, it's almost instinctual to start by thinking about how your characters got here, building a world around them, getting to know your characters, exploring how they interact.

You have to know this stuff, you have to take the time to imagine those first moments. Be there in them. Write them down. Maybe even outline the show that a premise pilot would be, living through the beats. Definitely hear your characters speak, listen to how they speak, when, why. But that's character development work. Put it in your bible.

Then push yourself to write something that's more typical of the series.

But not an ordinary episode either.

Write the best episode for the series that you can think of. The one that is most exciting, emotional and surprising. And the one that has the elements to show off your best writing skills.

There's another very practical reason not to do a setup episodes, that Weinman mentions and which I've lived through more than once. If you produce an episode that sets up the world, you're going to have to air it first. Even when you shoot the first episode second or third in the production order (so that the crew and actors are a little more experienced with the show) it may very well be a dog. Odds are twelve to one that it won't be the best episode you have in the can when your air date rolls around. But if it's a premise pilot, it's going on air first. And all those viewers who are going to tune in to catch the new show because of all the publicity surrounding the launch aren't going to see your best. They'll be seeing the setup. And you've lost an important chance.

Three by Sorkin

2007-06-20T21:02:00.000-04:00

I'm almost done with Teasers (for a while at least) but before I move on I thought I might compare Aaron Sorkin's approach to the opening moments of three different shows: Sports Night, West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Sports Night was a half hour series so you can't compare it to any of the other pilot teasers I've discussed thus far. The pilot opens with a quick little traditional sit com teaser of just a minute and a half in length. Entitled "The Quality of Mercy" and written by Bill Wrubel and Aaron Sorkin, the episode launches us right into the premise with the Sports Night show live on the air and Dan and Casey delivering their fast-paced banter. When the show goes to commercial, we visit the control room characters for more witty banter about…well, nothing really. And then we go to main titles and credits.

This is not a setup pilot. It could be any episode in the series. Sure it has some stuff about how the characters got to be on Sports Night, but you could have written this episode at any point in the course of the series and had the same (or more) impact. The purpose of this teaser isn't to introduce the story lines for the episode or to let you know who the characters are. Instead, the purpose of this minute and a half seems to be to bring you into the world and give you your first taste of Sorkin's smart dialogue.

Here are some Sports Night scripts, including a draft of the pilot.

A lot of people loved Sports Night. But not as many as loved West Wing.

West Wing came out of the box with style. The pre-titles teaser takes us sequentially through the series' main characters (or at least the characters who Sorkin thought would be the focus of the series back when he was writing the pilot). We start with a scene featuring Sam which serves to tell us a bit about his character and introduce the episode's main storyline (will Josh get fired). Then come a series of short scenes which mostly explore character: Leo finds a mistake in the New York Times crossword puzzle, CJ flirts and ends up falling off the treadmill, Josh sleeps at his desk and Toby rails against airline stupidity. These scenes are held together by the thinnest of plot devices: a story about the president falling off his bike (which will take about four more beats to complete). In each of the scenes, these characters refer to potus. And we're asking ourselves, what are they talking about? The answer comes in the final scene of the teaser, which establishes another of the episodes' sub-plots (Sam slept with a hooker): they've all been talking about the President of the United States. (Music swells, cut to those patriotism inspiring main title shots of the White House.)

The opening for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is very different. The leads, Danny and Matt, aren't even in it. They don't appear for a while. Instead, this Teaser serves to set up the series premise. It's set at the show behind the show just as it goes live to air. As you recall, the show runner goes crazy (like that could ever happen) and the way is cleared for Danny and Matt to return. It's a fourteen page teaser in the script (back then called Studio 7) and it's filled with Sorkin's brilliant snappy dialogue. What we learn about is the world of this fictional tv series and the forces that control it (sponsors, network execs and censors).

While the West Wing and Sports Night pilots drags us into typical episode of their respective series and show us just what the next zillion episodes will be like, at the Studio 60 pilot we are left wondering what the heck he's going to do next week. I think it may have taken Sorkin a while to figure it out too.

A Tour of Teasers

2007-06-19T21:01:00.000-04:00

Let's take a quick tour through the opening acts of some of the pilots that aired thus far this year.Traveler is a summer replacement series with a pilot written by David Diglio. It opened with the main titled followed by ten minutes of drama before the first commercial break. These ten minutes are used to set up the series premise. There's some character development along the way, but the main purpose of this act is to establish the continuing mystery which will drive the series. The show launches you straight into the action: two men running through Manhattan -- from something. Then the story flashes back a few days and moves forward full circle to let you know why they were running. Or at least partly why, but then the series about them continuing to run and continuing to try discover why it is they are doing so. It's quite a clever opening and very hooky.

Dirt, on the other hand, devotes three minutes and 20-odd seconds to a pre-titles teaser that is all about character. Dirt is the Courtney Cox vehicle about a tabloid editor. The pilot was written by Matthew Carnahan. The short sequence that opens the series features no regular characters but Cox's Lucy and doesn't really hint at the episodic plot or any of the season arcs, other than the fact that Lucy is hated and people may or may not want to kill her.

The pilot for Friday Night Lights, written by Peter Berg based on a novel by H.G. Bissinger, opens with seven minutes of drama before we get to the titles. We meet many of the main characters, their problems and the dynamics of some of their relationships to each other. The premise of the series is established and there's a little sex and a little violence thrown in as well. By the time you get to those titles, you're pretty deep into the world.

The Riches pilot was really strong in my opinion, but I didn't like the Teaser. I felt it verged on a shark jump, but then the episodes which follow also seem to get awfully close to that border. After the Teaser, the episode twists and turns and changes with every act and I think that makes it very successful as a viewing experience. Where I think the Teaser goes wrong is that it works so hard to establish character and give Eddie Izzard a forum to be Eddie Izzard that it stretches credibility. And the opening five minutes and 45 seconds are all about character, mostly Eddie's as the lead Wayne Malloy. And when we go to the titles, we really have no idea what the episode to follow is going to be about. Izzard, by the way, shares a story credit with Dmitry Lipkin, who takes the solo teleplay credit.

Meadowlands, written by Robert Murphy, which premiered earlier this week on Showtime, has a short little pre-titles Teaser that does nothing to establish the characters of the four blind folded people riding in a van. Nor does it tell us much about the episodic story to come. What it does do is give us the series premise and a taste of back story. Actually it didn't add much information to the series' poster and it didn't make me want to keep viewing.

And then there's Jekyll, written by Steven Moffat, my new hero. The pre-titles teaser runs nearly four minutes. It introduces us to two of the main characters, one of whom is looking at this story world with fresh eyes, just like we, the viewers, are. And what we learn about is a third character who isn't present. There is a promise of horror that we simply can't believe. In fact when the Teaser ends, we feel that the writer is building up to something he's not going to deliver on. But like The Riches, this is a pilot episode that twists and turns and changes and throws you for a lot of loops.

For me, the most successful opening acts were long, entertaining and gave me a sense of what was to come. I like a teaser that has lots of character and draws you into the story to come. For me, FNL and Traveler both did that well, but on the other hand, The Riches and Jekyll were both able to redeem themselves with what was to come.

Do You Really Want to Know?

2007-06-18T22:44:00.001-04:00

Will Dixon asks:
Can you elaborate? Are they still teasers anymore or just Act One's with a sexy beginning? And where is the title sequence falling in that opening chunk...pre first image? Or after 18 pages/minutes?

Can I elaborate? I was afraid to, lest you think my obsession with these details a little over the top, but now that you ask…

I can't address the location of the title sequence in these pilot scripts, since I have yet to see the produced versions (but I will and I will keep you posted on that front). However in terms of how nine hour-long pilot scripts are laid out I can give you more detail.

The short answer is there is a lot of variation:

Five of the scripts are divided into six acts:
Reaper, New Amsterdam and K-Ville each have a teaser followed by acts one to five, while The Darlings (a.k.a. Dirty, Sexy, Money) and Pushing Daisies avoid the word Teaser and label the acts one through six.

Four of the scripts are divided into five acts:
Life on Mars and Viva Laughlin call the first of those acts a Teaser but Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Babylon Fields call the first act Act One.

The scripts range in length from Life on Mars' wacky 50 pages to 66 for Reaper, but most hovering around the 60 mark.

You can read more about character dramas Viva Laughlin, a drama by Robert Lowry, here and Dirty, Sexy Money by Craig Wright, here.

It looks like K-Ville, written by Jonathan Lisco, is a straight up gritty crime show.

Did I mention that the paranormal is big this coming season? Pushing Daisies, written by Bryan Fuller, Reaper, written Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, written by Josh Friedman, Babylon Fields, by Michael Atkinson and Gerald Cuesta, New Amsterdam written by Allan Loeb and Christian Taylor and Life on Mars written by David E. Kelley (who can get away with a 50 page script) and Stu Moss all have sci fi, horror or fantasy elements.

And while we're on the subject of horror pilots, go out and find a screener of the pilot of the new British series Jekyll written by Steven Moffat. I'm telling you now, you need to see it. Hurry up. What are you waiting for?

Find this. Watch it. Amazing!

Don't Let 'Em Go

2007-06-18T16:38:00.001-04:00

I have a bunch of scripts for the pilots that got picked up by the US nets for the fall. I'm still working my way through the reading. But leafing through I've noticed a trend toward the beefy opening act.

Sometimes the script labels this section Teaser, sometimes Act One, but by and large they are long. Short is eight pages. But most are upwards of 10. 12, 13, 14 pages seems to be the norm for a Teaser/Act One. A couple of the scripts have 17, 18 page openings. Only one of the nearly dozen scripts has an anemic, traditional 3 page teaser.

If you've got an audience to tune in, why let them go? Keep them watching as long as possible before giving them a break in the action.

Act One of the pilot script for Pushing Daisies is 18 pages long.

Fucking Bollocking Twat Fuck

2007-06-16T08:50:00.000-04:00

The airing of a pilot is your big chance to hook in an audience for your series. In the week or so before broadcast, the show has had it's launch publicity and tonight's the night people are going to check it out. And by the time the titles or the first commercial break rolls around, the viewers are going to decide whether to stick around for the rest of the episode or change channels. And if they change channels now, the chances of getting them back ever are pretty slim. A lot rides on those opening minutes. So how do you make 'em count?

One of my favourite series of 2007 thus far is the British series Skins. The opening scenes of the pilot, entitled "Tony" and written by Bryan Elsley, are absolutely fabulous.

The show opens with a 30 second title sequence that is all shots of characters and ends with the series title "Skins".

The first shot of the first episode is close on eyes which pop open, awake, as the camera slowly pulls out to reveal a teenage boy in bed as church bells ring in the distance. His alarm goes off and he flicks on some music as he springs into action, doing his dips, chin ups and bicep curls in only his tight white underpants, his face expressionless. His first smile appears as he surveys his image in the mirror.

That sequence takes 37 seconds and it's all about character.

A teenage girl looking bedraggled in her smudged makeup and short skirt walks up the street.

In his bedroom, our teenage boy's watch alarm sounds. He stations himself at the bedroom window and looks out. In the window across the street, a woman allows her white robe to drop to the floor, revealing her naked back. She glances out the window; she knows our boy is watching.

On the street, the girl glances up at the woman's window and then at his. She stops, arms crossed, staring up at his window. Is she a pissed off girlfriend?

No, actually. She waves, trying to distract him as the naked woman turns in his direction providing a good front view. Below the young girl finally attracts his attention.

The boy turns to his stereo, cranking the volume higher, higher, higher still, smiling with satisfaction in the direction of his bedroom door, behind which we can barely make out a male voice: "Tony! Tony!"

Tony, the teenage boy, signals to the girl below and she lunges for the front door. An irate looking 40-something male wearing nothing but red boxers storms into Tony's room, yelling to be heard over the music.

"Sorry," says Tony, pretending to fiddle with the remote, "the volume's busted."

"Every fucking morning!" spurts his furious father. Meanwhile the young hottie is sneaking up the stairs, into her bedroom, peeling off her clubbing clothes and slipping into her demure English school girl uniform.We're not done yet.

Tony is now sitting on the toilet reading Sartre's Nausea as his father knocks on the bathroom door begging to be let in. Tony smiles mildly as he flushes, brushes and goes out the window, leaving the bathroom door locked and his father pounding and cursing on the other side.

Tony's Father
You fucking bollocking twat fuck. How come I'm
never allowed to use my own sodding bathroom?

Tony climbs down to street level, pauses to smile at the now-dressed woman from across the street and lets himself into the house.

In the kitchen, Mom is making eggs. His sister, now every inch the innocent school girl, nibbles toast. Dad, still ranting about getting into the bathroom, steps into the kitchen and stops dead when he sees Tony.

The lock is broken again, Tony claims mildly, as his father stares at him with mounting hatred.

By this time, you couldn't pay me to turn off this show. And the interesting thing about this opening is that none of it has anything to do with what follows. Tony's parents and sister don't have any significance in the series until a much later episode. This one has more to do with Tony's scheme to get Sid -- who we haven't even met yet -- laid.

Tony
Who's stupid enough to fuck Sid?

Michelle
Cassie.

Sid
She's still in hospital.

Michelle
No, she's not. They let her out. She's just not allowed to handle knives.

Instead of establishing story, the writer has opted to devote the first three and three quarter minutes of the pilot to setting up character. And he has done so beautifully.

Sid
What would you do if everything's so fucked up and you just don't know what to do?

Cassie
I stop eating till they take me to hospital.

(Btw, I couldn't find a picture of Bryan Elsley. If anyone can link me up to one, I'd love to add it in.)

Skins - Tony

2007-06-16T07:26:00.000-04:00

John From Cincinnati Part 1

2007-06-13T20:59:00.001-04:00

I don't get it. Yet. But I'm willing to invest some time and effort because after all this is David Milch.

Half a dozen scenes into my first viewing of the pilot for John from Cincinnati, written by David Milch and Kem Nunn, I put down my pen and paper and decided to just try to absorb the show. And it's going to take me quite a few more viewings to truly make sense of it structurally, thematically, storywise.

If this were an episode of a show on a conventional network, I believe the first six scenes would be the teaser. But this HBO and there are no commercial breaks to guide my breakdown. These first few scenes amazingly well-crafted. You meet most of the main players, learn a great deal about the storylines and themes that will presumably run through the series and never feel like you're getting back story. I hope to break down the whole show, but until I do, here are my thoughts on the opening sequence.

John from Cincinnati begins with the titles. Once they are out of the way, it's strictly story without interruption till the closing credits

The opening shot is the headlights of an SUV as it moves through low scrubby hills toward us. Linc (Luke Perry) gets out and walks toward the beach. In the distance we see Mitch Yost (Bruce Greenwood) surfing. Linc continues down the beach, John (Austin Nichols) appears behind him and utters the first line of dialogue for the entire series: "The end is near." Something tells me we've just been alerted to a major theme.

"Hey man, my brother," replies Linc, pointing out a number of people running past in the distance, "those illegals act like it's another day at the beach." What does this tell us? That we're near the Mexican border, yes. But I suspect the line and the immigrants are present to put us in the mind of the word "aliens" and maybe we're supposed to associate said word with John.

Mitch, done surfing, comes up the beach, board under his arm. (Is this the moment to mention Bruce Greenwood's six pack? He definitely looks every inch the aging surfer dude.)

John starts heading toward Mitch. Linc is amazed that he knows him. John replies that "Mitch Yost should get back in the game." And repeats almost the same words in a slightly different order to Mitch. Mitch and Linc think the game John is referring to is competitive surfing. We know better. Linc has already cottoned on to the fact that John is unusual because he's making finger circles at his temple to let Mitch know that John is a whack job.

We're just a minute and a half into the episode, but the question has already been raised, is John an alien or insane? So it's time for the writers give us some information about Mitch. That comes with his first lines. To John: "You should mind your own business." And to Linc, before Linc has said a word to Mitch, "Go fuck yourself." (The first "fuck" of the series, by the way, with many many to follow in this episode, at least. Milch hasn't lost any affection for the F-word since the demise of Deadwood.)

As Mitch walks away, Linc turns to John. Just in case John isn't crazy, he warns him to "stay away from the kid", threatening him with harm if he interferes with the deal in progress.

Scene one is two minutes long and we already know a lot. There's a mystery guy (John) who might be crazy or who might be from some place other than earth. We know Mitch is a bitter former surfer and that he and Linc have a history. And we know there's a kid and deal in the making.

Scene two is less deft and information packed. Cissy Yost (Rebecca De Mornay) standing on a pier watching Shaun Yost (Greyson Fletcher) surfing. He must be the kid in question. She calls to a girl running toward the water with her board to tell Shaun to stop by the store later, offering the girl a free bottle of wax for delivering the message. So, Cissy owns a store, presumably a surfing store since she carries a kind of wax that would interest a girl with a surf board. Cissy heads off and a mystery blonde woman moves into her spot to watch Shaun as he waits for the next waves.

Now we go back to the beach. Mitch is heading for his car with Linc at his side making his pitch. Mitch finds a syringe on the ground, picks it up, looks at it with disgust. It could be Butchie's. Mitch simultaneously blames and forgives Linc for Butchie's drug problems with this clever line: "Now he's proven to the world he can fuckup just fine without a sponsor." Several things fall into place: Linc represents sponsors and the source of the tension (or at least part of the tension) between Mitch and Linc is Butchie's drug use.

Linc wants to know if Mitch is going to Huntington to watch his grandson surf. Mitch didn't know the kid was planning to compete, but he won't let him and he won't let Linc "get your fangs in his neck like you did to Butchie." That's when Linc pulls out the DVD that Shaun sent him. The words "Sponsor Me" are scrawled across the front. Linc says, it's going to happen whether Mitch wants it or not. Shaun wants to get signed, he's the real deal and he's a Yost.

Linc's parting words: "Trust the devil you know, Mitch." And now, we know about Linc, he's the devil -- a mundane, nice guy sort of devil or at least the incarnation of commercialism in the surfing world; the guy who signs you. No wonder he drives the big black truck.

Now it's time to meet a few other characters. Outside a very run down motel, Meyer (Willie Garson) is handing up a sold sign as Ramon (Luis Guzman) watches. Meyer doesn't think the new owner is a very pleasant person.

We meet Butchie through his off-screen cry of "mother-fucker" before we see him. It seems Meyer's got him stashed rent free in this derelict motel because Meyer is a huge fan ("Butchie Yost revolutionized surfing, Ramon. He changed the entire idea of it.") Ramon thinks Butchie should be gone before the new owner shows up.

Butchie meanwhile is trying to push his beat up Volkswagen van. Meyer and Ramon attempt to corner him to discuss his moving out but Butchie ducks into his motel room claiming that he needs to take a "horrendous dump."

While Meyer pleads Butchie's case to Ramon, Ramon leads Meyer over to a huge pile of trash. He wants the lawyer's help in cleaning it up before the new owner arrives. Me thinks these two are the cleanup crew.

Meanwhile, inside his filthy motel room, Butchie Yost shoots up.

Back at the beach, Mitch stows his board in his car and takes out a big jug of fresh water. He pours the water over his head to wash away the salt. And then something strange happens. He lifts off. He looks down at his feet. They are a few inches above the ground. There he is, next to his old paneled station wagon, hanging in mid-air.

And that is where I would have put the act break to end a great tease. We're six and half minutes in and we've met some incredibly memorable characters and gotten a lot of back story effortlessly. We've got a pretty good idea that the show is not going to fit nicely into any genre. And I for one, was ready to commit to the full hour.

The Sopranos Finale

2007-06-11T20:52:00.000-04:00

I know. It's a blog about pilots, but how can I resist a finale now and then? So here's my breakdown of the twenty-first episode of the sixth season of the Sopranos, written by David Chase.

Because The Sopranos is produced for HBO and airs there without commercial breaks, it's not easy to discern act breaks and curtains. Nor are they important to the structure. Maybe that's why when I watch an episode of The Sopranos I never feel the structure. I always have the sense Chase is doing something very different than the rest of us. That's why breaking down the last episode was so informative for me.

The way I read it, there were many storylines through the episode: A. The situation with Phil, B. A.J. and his depression, C. the extended family (Bobby's death, Janice's future, Uncle Junior), D. Paulie, E. Meadow and her future and finally the thing we all wanted to know about, F. Tony's future. Maybe these aren't the plotlines as they saw them in the writer's room, certainly lumping all the extended family scenes (Bobby's funeral, Janice scenes and Junior scenes) into one group and calling them a sub-plot is pushing it, as is naming a sub-plot "the future". And you could easily argue that A.J.'s story is really the A, but in the absence of the writer to explain his thinking, you're stuck with my guesses.

Beat by beat:

• We open with Tony waking in the bed where we left him at the end of the last episode, assault weapon on hand. (A-story)
• With Paulie at his side, Tony tries to solve his problem by appealing to the FBI for help. (A, D)
• Tony visits Carmella and the kids at the house where they are staying. (B, E)
• Bobby's funeral - almost a mundane community event in its normalcy, A.J.'s continuing problems and where Paulie is at. (F, B, D)

• Back at the hide-out, Tony is avoiding going to see Syl. (A)
• Phil gives orders to his men by phone. (A)
• Tony talks to Janice about her future. (C)
• The FBI tips off Tony that Phil is making his call from a gas station pay phone. (A)
• Tony's men start cruising by gas stations looking for phones. (A)
• A.J. blows up his SUV. (B)

• Tony reams out A.J., the family is at odds. (B)
• An FBI wire tap picks up Tony trying to set up a meeting to end the Phil situation. (A, F)
• Carmine, Tony et al sit down. (A)
• The family moves home. (A)
• Paulie doesn't like that cat. (D)
• Looking for gas stations with phones. (A)
• Janice visits Uncle Junior. (C)
• Junior's pal pressures Tony to visit his uncle. (C)
• A.J. tells his shrink that the car fire "cleansed" him. (B)

• Paulie at the now empty BaddaBing calls Tony: Carlo disappeared. (F)
• Carmella talks to Meadow's old ne'er-do-well friend, now a med student. (E)
• Meadow's boyfriend's family is over for dinner, Meadow is going to be a lawyer. (E)
• The cat likes Chrissy's photo. Tony offers Paulie a business opportunity. (D)
• Looking for Phil. (A)
• A.J. is going to join the army. (B)
• Carmella learns about A.J.'s plan. (B)
• Carmella and Tony meet with A.J.'s therapist. Tony talks about his mother's influence on him.(B)
• Meadow reveals how Tony influenced her career choice. (E)
• Phil's massively brutal yet comical demise. (A)
• Carmella and Tony offer A.J. an alternative career. (B)

• Tony's lawyer reveals that the FBI are still actively after him. (F)
• Tony visits Syl. (A)
• Paulie doesn't want the new business opportunity, but has his arm twisted. (D)
• A.J. leaves work in a BMW, happy. (B)
• The family is at peace as they decide where to go for dinner.
• Tony goes to see Uncle Junior. (C)
• And then that long, hyper vigilant ending in the diner...

Like most hours, I count somewhere between 40 and 45 beats. More than a quarter are devoted to the A-story and slightly fewer to the B. All the other subplots play out in 4-5 beats with a lot of story separating some of the beats and others coming in pairs. This is the same pattern I've seen in many hourlong series episodes.

And we can see that the main storylines arc out neatly through the episode. The Phil situation is as bad as it can get as we open. Tony works at solving it through the episode until Phil is finally killed. I read Tony's visit to Syl as the tag scene to that story line. One of Tony's henchmen mentions early in the episode that Tonyhas a lot of reasons for not visiting the hospital ("Yesterday it was his gout."), but when Syl is avenged, Tony finally goes.

Likewise, A.J.'s story arcs neatly, he's depressed and stuck in his own silly opinions, his SUV burns and he emerges reborn and ready to join the military, but then accepts his parents' offer of an alternate way out. It tags out ironically with A.J. tooling around happily in his new Beamer.

This little exercise proves to me that David Chase tells a story just like the rest of us, only better. He's got beginnings, middles and ends but the lack of commercial breaks removes the need to bring the drama to four or five crescendos that punctuate the hour. That alone brings a subtlety to the hour. And then there's Chase's brilliance as a story teller, which I dearly hope he'll share with us again soon.

Dirty Sexy Money Pilot Script

2007-06-10T13:50:00.000-04:00

I spent the morning on another of the scripts that went to pilot and got picked up for the fall season. Dirty Sexy Money by Six Feet Under screenwriter, Craig Wright, is coming to ABC and CTV. This one is much harder to discuss without spoilers because it's very much about character, but I can give you some stats and structure.

The draft I read was labeled "network draft" and it was still titled with its rather bland original name "The Darlings". I kind of love the new name even though the pilot only really delivers on the money and hints at the dirty. We can only assume there's sex to come.

The script is 59 jam-packed pages plus title page. It with Act One (not a Teaser) and presumably the screenwriter believes that once he's got you, he should hold onto you as long as he can. The act runs a full 14 pages. Act Two is nine pages, Act Three 11, Act Four is 14 pages, Act Five is a mere six pages and Act Six is a mere five pages, perhaps qualifying it as a tease.

The act breaks are a good deal less cliffhangerish than you might expect, but they are clearly tent pole moments in the story. Act One ends with the death of the protagonist's father in flashback. Act Two ends with a flashback to the moment when he accepts the job that we already know he has. Act Three, again in flashback, drops the curtain on the job out of control. As Act Four ends, the reporter interviewing him in the present, accuses him of lying and he turns the tables by establishing that he knows she is lying too. At the end of Act Five it becomes clear that the reporter is a player in all of this in a different way and as the episode ends, the lead must decide whether to launch an investigation that will hurt the family his father spent a lifetime protecting.

There are a lot of characters to introduce and a lot of back story to present because this is going to be one of those arcing series in which many characters play out soapy storylines. The screenwriter uses a very clear structure to introduce the world, the people and the storylines that will develop over season one. The main through line has the protagonist (described economically as "pensive in a perfect suit") being interviewed by a sly reporter. We hear what he tells the reporter and flashback to an alternate version of the events. Through the flashbacks we meet everyone we need to know, first in the 1960s and 70s and then over the last few weeks.

Book ending the interview, at the top and tail of the episode are scenes that set up what we can only imagine is an important continuing storyline about the possible murder of the protagonist's father. Have I given away too much?

The stakes are money, fame and integrity. There's very little jeopardy compared to Viva Laughlin and the lead seems to be a straight up good guy who for reasons we don't entirely believe has given up a life of working for food banks and beleaguered nuns in order to keep a bunch of spoiled rich grown ups out of trouble. But there is mystery to the story, who are these people and why is our guy willing to abandon his own life to coddle them? It's the momentum of the narrative that pulled me in and kept me reading. The voice is breezy and the script is full of easily digestible moments: we know what's coming. The characters are familiar too: the political contender, Paris Hilton, the evil priest, the sexy ex and so on. This familiarity, the way the story seems to meet our expectations is part of what makes the script such an easy read. Also the characters are credible and all seem to have a depth of feeling; we might start to care about them.

There's no action and no sex (although all the women are sexy and men good-looking), but there is something compelling about the lives of the rich and famous and the potential juice of the soapy storylines that are set in motion. If we're lucky it will be a hipper, quirkier version of Dallas, if not, then it'll be Dynasty rehashed. But I will be watching and I'm looking forward to seeing how the script lifts to the screen.

Viva Laughlin Pilot Script

2007-06-08T21:01:00.002-04:00

I just read the script for Viva Laughlin, one of the pilots picked up for the fall by CBS and Global. Great script. The script by Huff creator Robert Lowry is a good read, has fabulously well-drawn characters and lots and lots of stakes. I can't wait to watch.

I don't want to give away any of the story or character details, but I do want to get into the structure of the script.

It's 67 pages long. The tease ends a quarter of the way down page 10, which is long for a tease, but once you've got their eyes, why would you let them get away? Act One ends right right at the top of page 22, making it really an 11 page act. Act Two ends halfway down 37, so 14.5 pages. Act Three is the only meaty act at 23 pages and Act Four scrapes in at just 9 pages and then there are 6 and a quarter pages of tag.

The tease sets up a man with a dream and ends with his dream in imminent danger. In the first act it gets worse, but the curtain is a kiss between our protagonist and his wife. The second act ends with a murder, the third with our guy threatened by the devil and his dream slipping away from him. The fourth act ends with his son coming forward with at least part of the solution and the episode ends with our guy, surrounded by family, triumphant.

The show focuses primarily on the protagonist, with very few scenes that don't include him. It hints at a season arc because the murder is unresolved and our guy looks like the best suspect.

The way I read the script, our guy's big dream in danger is the A-Story. The lines involving his wife and each of his kids are the three sub-plots. You might think of the hooks into the season arc as other threads running through.

Here's my haiku-style beat sheet of the action:

Tease
Meet a man who is on top of the world and filled with optimism
Meet his family, he only wants them to be happy but they are not
He gives his son a very generous gift
That he probably can't afford
In addition to his family, he has a big big dream
There are a LOT of problems
He refuses to let them get to him
He's part con-man, part humanitarian, all dreamer
His nemesis shows up with a threat to the dream that he can't ignore

Act One
He runs through the quick fixes, but all are out of the question
The only solutions are impossible
He will not be defeated
He rallies the team
He has a plan
Meanwhile things get more complicated with his daughter
His wife loves him but knows there's a problem. He tells her part of it
Meet the Devil
Our guy's big plan is to get in bed with the Devil
At least he has the love of a good woman behind him

Act Two
Our guy makes his pitch
It's a beauty
Undeniable
The Devil wants in
The Devil wants it all
The Devil is going to take the whole dream away from our guy in two days (tick tick)
Our guy channels his fury at this reversal by adeptly solving the problem his daughter doesn't believe she has
Meanwhile, his wife is having a day
She's worried about him, trying to support him, but he's not at the appointed spot
He's with a woman who's coming on to him
His new plan is to enlist the help of the vixen
She's noncommital
The wife is pissed at being stood up
He spends the night getting drunk
In the morning, he finds his nemesis murdered

Act Three
The vixen accuses our guy of the murder
The police take an interest, our guy squirms
He and his wife fight about all of it
His son overhears the secrets shouted in anger
He pleads for his wife's understanding
The cops make a plan
They try to befriend the wife without success
The vixen is connected to the Devil's henchman
The Devil's henchman visits our guy to remind him that time is up and the screws are about to tighten.

Act Four
Wife tries to make nice but his son wonders if he's a murderer and his daughter slams doors and cries
He makes nice with his daughter, a little con helps her see him as an understanding father
The cops try again and soften the wife just a little
Our guy says a prayer
He can't resist a bet
His son believes in him, at least enough to provide him with a big piece of the solution

Tag
He takes the partial solution from the son and with new self-conviction takes a huge risk that could end it all
And then he takes a huger risk
And wins
Suddenly he's back in the driver's seat.
The vixen is on hold
The Devil gets his pay
The dream comes together
Surrounded by his adoring family, our guy stands triumphant.

Simplicity itself.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Pilot

2007-02-12T10:01:00.000-05:00

And now for something completely different…

As much as I love and admire The Wire, it’s not a useful model for most of us. So let’s go now to the opposite end of the spectrum and look at a much watched and completely accessible hour long drama: CSI.

The pilot (which has no name other than "pilot") was written by Anthony Zuiker. I have watched it five or six times now. It is actually the first of a two parter, but we’re going to only look at the first hour now. And you’ll notice it lays down more neatly into acts.

You can read the beat by beat breakdown here.

Written by Anthony E. Zuiker

First shot: Night time Vegas sky line, all lit up,

Tease (4 beats):
Shots of night time Vegas intercut with someone loading a gun. Voice-over of a man’s suicide “note”. Gunshot. (B-story – fake suicide)

Then exterior night, crime scene, a cop says “here comes the nerd squad.” Meet: Captain Jim Brass. Meet: Gil Grissom. (character and premise)

Inside crime scene, guy dead in bathtub. Grissom begins his investigation as Brass theorizes that it’s a suicide. Science of maggots gives time frame. (B-story)

Grissom listens to the recorded suicide note with the upset family: not my son’s voice. (B-story)

Titles

Act 1 (11 beats):
Car pulls up outside Forensics lab. Woman heads inside: Holly Gribbs. (A-story: new girl’s first day)

Holly enters Grissom's weird office, looks around. Grissom sneaks up behind and scares her, welcomes her to Forensics. He needs her blood. (A-story)

Meet Nick Stokes and Warwick Brown, competing to see who can get to 100 solved cases first and get promoted to CSI 3. Warwick is a gambler. Nick, a good guy, wishes Warwick luck. (Character)

Grissom explains gig to Holly who already knows it. Character beat: Grissom feeds her a grasshopper. (Character and premise)

Captain Brass leads roll call: Nick lands a trick roll, Warwick gets a home invasion. (C- & D-stories)

Meet Catherine Willows pulling up late for work, saying goodbye to her daughter. (Character)

Brass is tough on Holly. And he establishes the unit and the mission: Number 2 crime lab in country, solving crimes most labs render unsolvable. Grissom talks to Brass like they are equals. (Character and premise)

Warwick and Catherine arrive at home invasion crime scene. Get 411 on crime: drunk guy who was living with the couple is dead. Husband admits to killing him, says it was self-defense. Warwick thinks he’s lying. Shoe tread science. Shoe/foot clues. (C-story)

Holly’s first autopsy. It’s not a suicide, it’s a homicide: Science of gunshot animation. Holly freaks out and leaves autopsy. (A-story)

Holly wanders into wrong room, pukes, finds herself locking in a room full of corpses. (A-story)

Grissom rescues her. Calls the corpses assholes What a warm and funny guy! And what a soft curtain to the act! (A-story)

Act 2 (10 beats):
Nick investigates the trick roll. 411: Out of towner lost his wedding ring to a hooker who drugged him. Flashback to what happened. Nick empathizes, swabs gums. (D-story)

Grissom delivers Holly to a robbery crime scene and leaves her there. (A-story)

Warwick in lab examining hair fibres: science of hair. Signs of struggle. (C-story)

At the robbery crime scene, the victim is hard on Holly. (A-story)

Warwick in the interrogation room with the husband from the home invasion. In flashback, the husband revises his story. (C-story)

Holly calls for backup, the victim is holding a gun on her. (A-story)

Nick with chemist checking on his swab. Character banter. Swab is no good. No evidence. (D-story)

Catherine rescues Holly (Catherine carries a gun.). (A-story)

Grissom hits a model head with a golf club to check out science of blood spatter (Holly’s blood runner). In comes Warwick to discuss his home invasion case. Grissom advises: concentrate on the evidence. (C-story)

Warwick takes another look at the shoe. A long (60 seconds) nearly silent (there’s music and two lines) scene of Warwick sitting at a table looking at a running shoe. It almost feels like science when he finds a toe nail and it warrants a special effect. Knows the husband is lying. (C-story)

Act 3 (7 beats):
Tape recorder from Grissom's suicide case: the science of a too perfect fingerprint, possibly planted. There’s also lecithin and latex. Sexy banter (Grissom had a bad date with the lab tech.) We leave the lab tech searching for a print match. (B-story)

Holly and Catherine in a restaurant talking back-story. Is Holly cut out for CSI? Catherine loves her job: it’s a puzzle. We do the important police work. (A-story)

Warwick appeals to Brass for help getting a warrant. Brass blocks him because he believes the husband’s story instead of the evidence. Brass is an ass. (C-story)

Nick on the scene of a car accident. The victim has discoloration in her mouth, but Nick sees nothing criminal here, sends her to the hospital. (D-story)

Warwick in his car outside judge’s house. Judge will trade a warrant for a bet. (C-story)

Detective interviews guy about a staged suicide – his fingerprints were at the scene. Grissom stumbles in. Guy’s job gives him access to latex. (B-story)

Guy’s job: makes latex body parts. He made a latex hand that made the fingerprint on the tape recorder – that means the killer is proficient at forensics. (B-story)

Act 4 (16 beats):
Nick at the hospital to ask about trick rolls. Prostitutes who’ve been mysteriously knocked unconscious and have skin discolouration on their nipples. (D-story)

Nick with prostitute from car accident. Takes a look at her nipples and concludes: whatever the trick roll ingested got onto her nipples and knocked her out too. So give back old man’s belongings and tell me what you’re using. (D-story)

Lab: lab tech explains contents of bottle. Essentially knock out drops only he makes it sound like science. Flashback: prostitute puts drops on nipples, lets out of town man got at it. He passes out, she robs him, takes off and then she passes out behind the wheel of her car. (D-story)

Grissom goes back to not-a-suicide victim’s family. We’re ruling out suicide, we believe it was a homicide. Mother is relieved. Grissom doing good heart warming work. (final beat of B-story)

Catherine at hospital. She has to investigate a little girl who was molested. She feels terrible. (Catherine character runner)

Brass takes Warwick off his case because he went to the judge behind his back. Now he has to shadow Holly as punishment. (C-story)

Grissom reams Warwick out for thinking about anything but the case. (C-story)

Warwick drops Holly at crime scene while he runs an errand. (A-story)

Grissom goes to investigate the husband in the home invasion. He has a warrant for his toe nail. Lots of cool science to get the toe nail. (C-story)

Catherine takes a break: goes to visit her daughter just to say I love you. (Catherine character runner)

Matching toe nails under a microscope: science. Bingo! (C-story)

Warwick does some gambling. (Character scene)

Husband under arrest with Grissom and Warwick watching. Flashback to what really happened. (C-story)

Holly dusting for prints. Interrupted by a man with a gun in his belt. (A-story)

Nick brings the out of towner with everything he lost to the hooker. (D-story)

Nicky gets his CSI level 3 badge in front of the whole team. But Brass turns up to throw cold water on the party: Holly’s been shot. They don’t think she’s going to make it. And Warwick is in big trouble for leaving her. On Grissom, upset. (A-story)

Cut to black.

Although CSI doesn’t feel like a fast paced show, it uses 48 beats in this pilot which is a lot. At least eight of those beats are there mostly to establish the series premise and build the characters of the leads. The remaining beats drive quite a few interwoven stories which form the A, B, C and D stories.

The pilot breaks down into a tease and four acts. The fourth act is long long long at 16 beats. Normally episodes of CSI are the expected tease, four acts and a tag with the tease and tag using 2 beats each and the acts ranging between 7 and 11 beats each – about 40 beats in all. And although the pilot has the squad looking into at least three different cases (the suicide that’s a homicide, the home invasion and the trick roll) as well as following Holly through her first day with includes other cases, a regular episode of the series only features two cases.

What I’m calling the B-story here is the first plot line up. We follow Grissom through his investigation of the suicide that’s really a murder. The plot is only 7 beats. Presumably we start with this minor storyline because it allows a hyped up tease with gunshots and a bloody crime scene. Something to hook you into the series. But after the tease, this plot is pretty much ignored until act 3 where there are a cluster of beats. And the storyline doesn’t truly resolve; the murder is never found, but Grissom brings relief to the family when he informs them that it wasn’t a suicide but a murder (but of course they knew that at the tease curtain when they told him that that wasn’t the victim’s voice on the tape recorded suicide note.)

The A-story is Holly’s first day on the job. It takes 14 beats, dominating act 1 and being the cliff hanger that closes the show. This story plays out quite strongly in every act and involves three of the regulars emotionally (Grissom, Catherine and Warwick). The instinct with pilots is to start at some kind of beginning – the formation of a unit, a first day of school (Veronica Mars), the first game of the season (Friday Night Lights), etc. In this case, the unit is well-established but a minor character is introduced and it is her first day on the job. The audience learns about the world through her. Unfortunately for Holly, she’s dead at the end of the episode.

The C-story is all about Warwick and his home invasion case. It’s a big one with 12 or 13 beats depending on how you look at it. It wraps up with a murderer under arrest.

Finally, the D-story, Nick’s trick roll case is 8 or 9 beats long by my reckoning. It is intro’ed in Act 1, but we never come back to it till Act 2 where we get two more beats. Then another one in three and it really heats up in Act 4.

By Act:
Tease: A, Character, A, A
Act 1: B, B, Character, Char/Premise, C/D, Character, Char/Premise, C, B, B, B
Act 2: D, B, C, B, C, B, D, B, C, C
Act 3: A, B, C, D, C, A, A
Act 4: D, D, D, A, Character, C, C, B, C, Character, C, Character, C, B, D, B

We can see that the beats for some stories appear in clusters and others weave through the entire episode. The A story occurs almost entirely in the Tease and Act 3, while D is focused in Act 4.

It’s amazing that as jam-packed with plotlines as the episode is, there’s still lots of room for scenes that are entirely about the series premise and the characters. And don’t forget, there are also little science scenes and four flashback scenes which help us to understand the theories about what happened and what really did happen. Plus a scene that lasts a full 60 seconds which is just someone looking over a running shoe. It’s quite amazing for a show that feels relaxed in its pacing.

The pilot has four re-enactment/flashbacks and about 9 moments devoted to science, many of them accompanied by some sort of special effect. Regular first season episodes keep up this pace.

The pilot has a number of sexual and violent references to hype it up. There’s the trick roll story line in which a prostitute’s breasts figure quite prominently so to speak. The flashbacks suggest quite strongly that the victim’s face was mashed into them (and he seemed to enjoy it). There’s a scene in which a young girl has to point out what body parts the molester touched and her dolly has a band aid on its crotch. Grissom hits a dummy head with a golf club and blood splatters everywhere. There’s an autopsy with some gruesome cutting and a scene with a lot of corpses in the morgue. One of the lab techs wishes that Grissom would pin her up against a wall. All of these and a few others, send the message that this is going to be a series with a lot of jolts.

One final thing we should touch on are the act breaks. Usually you expect strong cliffhanger curtains, is that what we get here? The tease ends on what we’re calling the A-story and the discovery that it’s not a suicide, but a murder. That moment has to hold your interest for a long time, because we aint coming back to that particular story for another two acts. Act 1 has a soft character curtain. It’s a B-story beat. Holly’s just been scared silly by dead bodies at the morgue and Grissom makes a joke by calling them assholes. End of Act. Act 2 ends with the examination of the running shoe and Warwick’s conclusion that the husband is lying. At the end of Act 3 we’re back on the long lost A-story. Grissom concludes that the killer knows his way around forensics. This is a false cliffhanger if ever I heard one, since we never revisit this question in Act 4. And the episode ends on the team learning that Holly is dead and Warwick is in trouble. We go to black on Grissom’s concerned face. In all these aren’t the hard edgy curtains we expect from mystery series.

Over all, I’m surprised by how many story balls this episode is able to keep in the air, how much time it takes to develop character and the series premise and by how soft the curtains are. The pilot is definitely quite different than a normal episode, offering more stories, more beats, more violent and sexual references and fewer act breaks.

And that is how one of the most successful of the recent tv franchises launched.

The Wire - Episode 1: “The Target”

2007-02-10T12:41:00.000-05:00

Story by: David Simon & Ed Burns
Teleplay by: David Simon

The first shot is a thin blood trail on pavement.

Detective Jimmy McNulty and an informant discuss the victim’s name: Snot Boogie. The scene seems to be mostly about McNulty’s bemused attitude toward the job. There is no outrage or excitement around the fact that this guy has been shot, it’s just McNulty’s banter with the guy who knew the dead guy. The scene ends with the words “This is America, man.”
The murder and the informant seem to have very little to do with what follow so I can only conclude that this scene is more about character and theme than the story. I figure that they needed something exciting to pull you into the series: a murder. Because the real story starts after the titles.

Titles

“When it’s not your turn.”
Bunk

Every episode begins with a quotation from a character that you’ll hear later in the episode. This is the kind of thing that you can set up in a pilot script and then can have incredible trouble keeping up later on. But The Wire’s pulled it off beautifully every time. Later, Jimmy McNulty will chide his homicide partner Bunk for answering the phone and in so doing catching a homicide case that should have gone to some other detective. That’s what happens when you care when it’s not your turn to care. Of course, the whole episode, the whole first season in fact, is about what results from Jimmy McNulty caring when it’s not his turn.

After titles and quote, we come back to Jimmy, he’s walking through the courthouse with Bunk. Before they part, he warns Bunk not to answer the phone. If he’d only he’d take his own advice. But no. (C-story = Bunk’s decomp)

McNulty heads into a courtroom and sets everything that follows into motion. This is your proverbial inciting incident. McNulty cares when it’s not his turn and goes to watch D’Angelo Barksdale’s trial. It’s not his case, but there he is, laying eyes on Stringer Bell, lanky, smooth and self-confident, also watching D’s trial. The first witness, a male security guard, IDs D’Angelo as the shooter, but the second, a female security guard, maintains quite forcefully that D didn’t do it and she made a mistake when she first identified him. It’s damaging testimony. The scene gives us our first looks at Judge Phelan and a bunch of the Barksdale crew: Stringer and D, Wee Bay, Stinkum and Sarvino. The last three are there to keep up the intimidation on the witnesses. McNulty leans over and compliments Stringer as he leaves the courtroom, serving notice that he’s on to him. (A & B-story – A=formation of the police unit; B=world of the Barksdales and how D ends up in the Pit)Jimmy looks in on the detective who’s case has just been blown in court and tells him that the Barksdale kid just got off. The detective can’t believe it. (Character)

Meet Kima in her car with a witness and the walkie with other detectives on a stakeout. She gives the word. (Character)

Meet Carver and Herc as they take down the perp. Men of action. Herc finds a great big gun in the car. Then Kima comes over and finds a second gun, reminds Herc there are always TWO guns. Kima’s an ace cop. Herc’s a goof. Carver? Somewhere in the middle. (Character)

Back to the courtroom. Phelan gives his judgment as McNulty watches: D is not guilty. (A & B-story)

McNulty heads down a corridor in the courthouse. Someone’s calling his name. The judge wants to talk to him. (A-story)

In chambers, Phelan and Jimmy are old friends, familiar with each other. Jimmy gives us the lowdown on the Barksdale gang: they own the towers, the low rises, the corners and have for a year. They are responsible for a lot of bodies and this is the third case they’ve beaten by intimidating witnesses. Last time, it was Jimmy they beat. Phelan’s pissed that it happened in his courtroom, he’s a new judge and interested in flexing his power. (A-story)

Back at the cop shop Herc and Carver tell us they’re the kind of cops who go out and bust heads. Flex some muscle and show the drug dealers who’s boss. Meanwhile, Kima struggles with paperwork. (Character)

McNulty meets up with Bunk on an investigation. There’s a decomposing corpse. McNulty chastised Bunk for picking up the phone and refuses to help. He heads back to his desk while Bunk prays that the “decomp” in not a murder. (C-story)

Meet Lt Daniels and Major Rawls. Rawls is giving Daniels shit about Avon Barksdale. (Here comes the shit rolling down hill…) Rawl is feeling pressure from Phelan. (A-story)

Daniels hands the case to Kima. Her report is due to tomorrow. When Daniels admits they don’t even have a date of birth on Avon, Kima realizes how tough a case this will be. (A-story)

Meet McNulty’s Sgt. Landsman who sends Jimmy off to see the Major. (A-story)

Rawls gives McNulty the double finger (one for his Irish ass and the other for his eye). Talk about stakes. McNulty’s boss is vowing undying hatred for him and all he did was answering the judge’s questions when asked. But that’s what you get for caring when it’s not your turn. (A-story)

Quick cut of Kima up late typing. (A-story)

Then over to D and Wee Bay in the car, D talking about what happened in court. Wee Bay stops the car and on the sidewalk makes D repeat the rule. “No talking in the car.” It’s an interesting juxtaposition, Rawls with his double fingers up and Wee Bay, in his quiet intense way asking D to just say it. It’s our first hint that maybe the drug dealers and the cops have to deal with similar issues (getting soldiers to keep their mouths shut), but their methods for doing it are different. (B-story)

At the strip club, we meet Avon Barksdale, clearly Stringer’s boss. Stringer tells Avon about McNulty. (B-story)

Avon has a moment alone with Dee. He’s quiet and understated with Dee but very clear in his message: D has to do things differently, be smarter. Again the contrast is striking. Avon seems so civilized and polished compared to the red faced Major and his dealings with Jimmy. Rawls has pledged undying hatred, while Avon pulls his nephew D into a hug and says “it’s love man, it’s family”. (B-story)

McNulty is typing the report on the Barksdale crew when Bunk returns. Bunk’s case isn’t a homicide. Sergeant Landsman is in early, pissed off at McNulty for stirring up shit, he’s certain McNulty’s going to land up sent to the Western. McNulty makes his second big mistake of the episode and lets slip what he’d hate most: to end up on the boats. Landsman predicts that where he’ll be pretty soon, pulling the midnight shift. From demotion talk among the cops we cut to(A-story):

D arriving early for work at the towers, but Stringer’s waiting for him. D’s been demoted to the “Pit: -- the low rises. (Stringer offers the promise that he can work his way back up.) And yes, his uncle Avon knows. (B-story)

Upstairs, Major Rawls and Major Valchek meet in the elevator. Both are pissed at McNulty, who Rawls says is dead to him. (A-story)

Dee takes his first look at the pit. Tells Bodie and Wallace that he killed a nigger. (B-story)

Valchek gives Daniels the Barksdale file. (A-story)

Meet Bubbles and Johnny – addicts – making counterfeit money. Bubs is teaching the kid the ropes. Bubbles will be a series regular, appearing in all four seasons. His runner in this episode is only a four beats, but significant because it again shows us that this is a world turned upside down. Bubbles the drug addict is the only really decent person we meet. He cares about young Johnny and has nothing personal to gain from the friendship. (D-story – or maybe it’s a runner: how Bubbles ends up siding with the police)

D at work in the pit, learning the ropes, teaching his new crew a new way of “serving” customers. They discover that Wallace has been burned with counterfeit money. (B&D story)

Bubbles and Johnny are shooting up. Bubs tells Johnny he’s green and that he’s trying to give him some game. Johnny says he’s ready, he wants to make the buy next time. Bubs knows he’s not ready. (D-story)

Daniels goes in to see the Deputy of Operations, Ervin Burrell. Burrell explains the rules for the Barksdale case. No long surveillance etc. Just buy and bust to satisfy Phelan. (A-story)

McNulty visits a friend at the FBI. Special Agent Fitzhugh says that the FBI is abandoning drugs for terrorism. Jimmy witnesses a state of the art wire in action. (A-story)

Johnny runs the scam, fucks up and gets caught. The Pit crew catch him and wait for D. The crew understands chain of command, D’s in charge and they won’t act without his say so. D gives his tacit consent and they start kicking the shit out of Johnny. D doesn’t seem to have a taste for violence. (D-story)

Daniels gathers his team to explain how the Barksdale investigation will go down. He and McNulty get in a fight because McNulty knows that buy and bust won’t bring down Barksdale. Daniels reminds McNulty about the importance of chain of command. State’s Attorney Rhonda Pearlman tells them to get their act together. The antagonism and mutual distrust between Daniels and McNulty is set. (A-story)

As they drink at a bar, McNulty and Bunk discuss the terms of Jimmy’s divorce. Bunk notes that everyone is always mad at Jimmy. Jimmy knows he’s fucked. (Character and theme)

Meanwhile at the strip club, Stringer in his civilized way chews D out for not being hard enough on Johnny. D meets Shardene, a stripper. He’s interested, but not tonight. (Character and theme)

Kima goes home to her girlfriend and starts in on her homework for school. Kima is trying to better herself. (Character)

Bunk and Jimmy are still drinking. They are hammered now and near a train track. As Jimmy takes a leak on the tracks and a train bears down on him, he announces he’s going to investigate the Barksdale case the way it should be done. (A-story)

Bubbles is at the hospital when Kima arrives in answer to his call. Johnny lies in a bed, clearly very badly hurt from the beating. Bubbles is ready to squeal on the guys who did it. (A and D come together)

In the homicide office, Landsman assigns Bunk a new case. (A-story)

A crowd surrounds the murder scene when Bunk arrives. D is in that crowd. Bunk rolls the body to see the face. It’s the guard who testified against D. D recognizes him and walks away quickly. He doesn’t like the violence or what’s happened. (A & B come together)

So ends the episode.

A lot of story and a lot of characters set up. Note that beats from the same story thread are often clustered: several As in a row, almost all the Ds come together at the end. When we flip back and forth between A & B, it’s to juxtapose the two very different organizations (the crude world of the cops where caring is the wrong thing to do and the slick Barksdales who very much want their people to care and be careful). Even in this very complex story, the beats are grouped together to make the stories if not exactly accessible, more accessible. This pilot introduces lots and lots of characters. Some day we’ll come back to this series and look at character intros, but for now let’s just admire the brilliance of the structure and dream of the day when we can write a series a like this one.

Pilots

2007-01-27T11:07:00.000-05:00

I have been thinking a lot about pilots. In the last year I've been hired to story edit a few series in development and have watched the writers struggle to get their pilots working. I always advise people not to write a "first" episode. Don't set up the series. Write a typical episode. Then the producer and broadcaster know what they're getting into and you know how your concept works. But of course, working on my own pilot, I am writing a set up episode. Hopefully, it has all the other elements in place, but it is my protagonist's first day on the job. So much for following my own advice.

As I write, I am also studying other people's pilots. I have watched the first eps of Veronica Mars, The Shield, CSI, Friday Night Lights and the Wire a bunch of times. And I've started breaking them down and analyzing them from a structural point of view. Those analyses are what I'm going to share with you for these first few posts.

I'm going to start with The Wire. Masterpiece that it is. You might want to watch it again before you read what I have to say. If you have to buy season 1, it's money well spent.

I sometimes watch The Wire with the subtitles on so I can follow the dialogue.