Life on Mars Times Two

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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!