As the male and female demographics fight it out this weekend at the box office, casting their votes for devils or fatalities, I want to acknowledge one of the most unique screenwriting challenges there is. Only a small number of screenwriters ever find themselves in a position where they have to tackle this challenge. And almost all of them fail. So today, I want to talk about how to avoid screwing it up.

But first, since the theme this weekend was “screenplays that fall apart,” I don’t think there could’ve been a more perfect example of that phenomenon at play than Beef.

I’ve been egg and noodling my way through these final episodes and wow has this thing gone off the rails. A show that started out promising has become borderline unwatchable due to sheer sloppiness. To give you an example of what I mean, Episode 7 sends the entire country club cast to Seoul. And man is the screenplay straining to make that development happen.

Once they arrive, everybody suddenly realizes their lives are at stake. So now our cast of five completely normal people are trapped in a kung fu battle against a gang of angry plastic surgeons (this includes the 4 foot 11 inch 78 pound Cailey Spainey). I’m not exaggerating! Out of nowhere, the show turns into a Jackie Chan version of John Wick, with the camera flying around while characters dive, punch, kick, and kill, occasionally teaming up for synchronized dual kicks as the score swells heroically.

Meanwhile I’m sitting on the edge of my couch leaned forward with my mouth hanging open saying, “WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THIS SHOW????”

I know some of you don’t like White Lotus. But this is what happens when somebody with one tenth the talent of Mike White tries to make a White Lotus style show. It’s a perfect demonstration of how quickly a story collapses once the writing implodes.

There are a lot of lessons you can pull from this but the biggest one is that stories start falling apart the second writers impose what they want characters to do instead of letting characters behave the way they would if the situation were real.

Because look at what’s happening here. The writer desperately wants everybody in Seoul. Which means the screenplay has to bend itself into pretzels manufacturing excuse after excuse to force every character onto that plane. None of it feels organic. None of it feels authentic. And that’s because, in real life, most of these people would never make these choices. Maybe one or two of them would. But all of them? No chance.

Audiences are rarely conscious of the technical mechanics behind bad writing. They’re not sitting there analyzing screenplay structure. They’re not identifying motivation problems. But they absolutely feel when something is wrong. They feel when a story stops behaving like life and starts behaving like a writer dragging characters around by the neck.

I actually think this battle between what we, as writers, want our characters to do and what those characters would realistically do is one of the most underrated aspects of screenwriting. Because obviously your story has to conclude. Real life usually doesn’t. People avoid confrontation. They procrastinate. They leave things unresolved. Which means that every screenwriter eventually has to push characters toward decisions they might not naturally make.

The trick is making those decisions feel plausible anyway.

That skill is one of the biggest differences between good writers and bad writers. And look, I’m not naive about the realities of television production. Time pressures absolutely contribute to this stuff. If writers don’t have enough time to smooth out motivation and behavior, they start forcing story beats into existence that no longer resemble human decision-making. Maybe that’s what happened here.
But it’s still shocking because Episode 1 of this season felt professional. Episode 7 feels like a film school student who’d never made a movie before was suddenly handed 20 million dollars and told to direct an episode. He’s serving his inner fanboy rather than the story.

As for Devil Wears Prada and Mortal Kombat, I think we’re watching a major shift in how studios approach these properties. Mortal Kombat currently has a 65% Rotten Tomatoes critic score but a 90% audience score. Devil Wears Prada sits at 78% with critics and 86% with audiences.

And honestly? I think studios in 2026 care way more about that audience number than they do the critic score.

The path to getting here has been interesting.

For most of the 2000s, Rotten Tomatoes took over Hollywood. If your movie dipped below 70%, there was a good chance it was dead commercially. So studios became obsessed with reverse engineering critic approval. What did critics want? Whatever those things were, they started building them directly into the screenplay process from day one.

This was Marvel’s entire strategy during Phase One and early Phase Two. And it worked brilliantly. Every movie was scoring above 85%. Then the marketing would get to work weaponizing those scores. If a movie had a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, that was objective proof that the movie was great.

Then audience scores entered the equation.

At first, nobody trusted them. They felt messy and unreliable. But something interesting happened. Certain movies started getting mediocre or bad critic scores while simultaneously pulling huge audience numbers. And those films realized they could flip the narrative. They could market themselves around the idea that critics didn’t understand the movie. But the audience did.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie was the peak example of this. Critics shrugged it off. Audiences devoured it.

That changed things.

Because once audience approval becomes more valuable than critic approval, studios no longer felt pressured to cram every screenplay full of the kinds of things they thought critics admired. Fake depth. Forced thematic importance. Characters who feel engineered in a laboratory to generate think pieces.
Most regular moviegoers don’t care about that. They just want to have a good time. The first Mortal Kombat movie felt lost, a mash-mash of ideas in desperate search of a narrative. This new one looks like it understands the assignment. 

Honestly, centering things around Johnny Cage was the smartest move they could’ve made. You need somebody grounded and charismatic to pull audiences through a tournament this ridiculous. You need a human anchor amidst the insanity. That connection point matters way more than pretending Mortal Kombat is some profound meditation on the human condition.

As for Devil Wears Prada, I was thinking about how unique a screenwriting challenge it is to revisit characters we haven’t seen in 20 plus years. And how almost every screenwriter assigned with this challenge screws it up.

The two examples that immediately jump to mind are Happy Gilmore 2 and The Last Jedi.
Because what inevitably happens in these situations is that the writer becomes obsessed with the question: “What has this character been doing for the last 25 years?” Which, to be fair, is not a bad question. In fact, it’s a very natural question. But it’s also a dangerous one because it can trap you into approaching the character backwards.

The best version of this process should always begin with: “What’s the best possible version of this character for this story?”

That’s where most screenwriters start when creating someone new. But legacy sequels don’t do that. They often start with chronology instead of storytelling. They start with biography instead of essence. And once you do that, you open the door to building a bad version of the character simply because it logically connects to the passage of time.

Which is exactly what happened with Happy Gilmore 2 and The Last Jedi.

Both movies started with the question of what these characters had been through over the years and both writers arrived at the same answer: they must now be depressed, bitter, cynical shells of themselves. And in both cases, that decision completely destroyed iconic characters.

Because audiences are not coming back after 25 years to reconnect with the worst version of somebody they loved. They want to reconnect with the essence of why they loved that character in the first place.

I actually think JJ Abrams understood this much better with Han Solo. He knew that if Han Solo showed up as some defeated suburban dad buying diapers at the Ewok Trading Hut on Endor, audiences would revolt. Nobody wants to see that version of Han Solo. We want to see the guy still out there stirring shit up across the galaxy. We want the rogue. We want the swagger. 

That does not mean characters can’t evolve. Of course they can. But evolution and erosion are not the same thing.

Look, understanding your character’s backstory is important. I encourage it. It helps you discover behavior, psychology, motivation, wounds, contradictions. All good things. But you cannot allow the backstory to dictate the core identity of the character to the point where they no longer feel like themselves.

What did you guys watch this weekend? Please let me know because outside of Widow’s Bay, I genuinely cannot find anything on the streamers right now that I like.

And what can you do to make sure it doesn’t happen to you?

During yesterday’s read of the first Blood & Ink script, a question burrowed into my mind. And it’s not a new question. It’s one of those screenwriting questions that never fully goes away because nobody seems to have a definitive answer for it. But it’s worth continuing to explore because it’s such a pervasive problem in the craft.

How come so many screenplays fall apart?

Yesterday’s script started strong. It was setting up this potential romance, this weird subject matter, this fun little town, this wacky space mold. You could feel the potential. But as each subsequent five pages passed, the script became messier and messier.

And I’m not picking on the writer, Eric. I see this all the time. I see it in scripts I consult on. I see it in Black List scripts. I occasionally even see it from high earning professional screenwriters.

So let’s figure out why this happens and what you can do to avoid it.

The first problem is that when writers come up with an idea, they usually only come up with the beginning of the idea. If you create a body switch concept like Freaky Friday, you’re almost exclusively focused on the switch itself and the two or three funny scenes that immediately come after it. You’re thinking about the fun. The irony. The hook.

But you’re not thinking beyond that.

Which leads us to our first mistake.

1) Starting too soon

If you start writing your script days, or even weeks, after coming up with the idea, you’re putting yourself in a very weak position. Because all you really know is the inciting incident, a few fun scenes after it, and maybe the climax. Everything in between is a giant question mark.

You are writing blind.

That’s not to say you can’t eventually find your way through the valley. Plenty of writers do. But the odds are stacked against you. You have no idea where you’re going and eventually that lack of direction catches up to you.

Treat a script idea like an expensive jacket you want to buy. Don’t buy it immediately. Let it sit for three months. If, after three months, you still desperately want that jacket, then you know it means something to you. Same with scripts. If the idea is still burning inside you months later, there’s probably enough depth there to sustain 110 pages.

Because a screenplay is not built on excitement alone. It’s built on depth.

Which brings us to the second mistake.

2) Weak concepts run out of gas

Think of a screenplay like a rocket. It needs enough propellant to break through the atmosphere. Weak concepts have less propellant.

And by “weak,” I mean concepts that don’t contain a strong character pursuing a strong goal.
In Project Hail Mary, Grace and Rocky desperately need to figure out what’s killing the stars or the galaxy is doomed. That objective powers the story forward. It gives every scene urgency and direction.

When you get into those later second act scenes, scenes 30 through 45, you need a protagonist who’s still aggressively pursuing something important. Because that pursuit is what keeps the screenplay alive. It creates momentum. It pulls the reader through the story.

Without that engine, scripts start wandering. Scenes become repetitive. Characters start talking in circles. The screenplay loses shape.

Okay, time to move into controversial territory.

3) Outline

You could argue that the entire purpose of outlining is to make sure the back half of your screenplay actually works.

Outlining is your chance to test drive the story before spending months writing it. It allows you to sketch out the second half and see if there’s actually enough material there to sustain a movie.

Even if you hate outlining, you should still spend a week imagining what scenes occur after the midpoint. Because when writers first conceive of an idea, they naturally imagine scenes anyway. Usually early scenes. Sometimes the climax.

But what about the middle?

Do you actually have scenes there?

Because if you’re struggling to imagine scenes in the second act, that’s a warning sign. Either the concept isn’t strong enough yet or you’re approaching it from the wrong angle.

And if you truly can’t imagine scenes there, you definitely need to outline. Because it means you don’t yet understand the specificity of your movie. Outlining forces you to engage with the execution in a concrete way.

One thing writers consistently underestimate is how much real estate a screenplay takes up. We think we’ve figured out 100% of the movie. Then we start writing and realize we’ve only figured out 25%.
That’s when the immensity of a screenplay hits you.

The more prep work you do, the more land you’ve mapped out before the journey begins. But if you’re staring at 100 miles of uncharted territory, eventually you’re going to get lost.

4) Very few writers understand how to navigate Act 2, especially the back half

There are three things that need to be firing on all cylinders throughout your second act.

Your hero must be pursuing a goal they desperately want to achieve.

Your characters must constantly be running into conflict, both internally and externally.

And you must continue throwing obstacles at your hero that make achieving the goal difficult.

I thought Project Hail Mary did an amazing job with this. The goal remains pervasive throughout the second act (solve the astrophage problem to save the stars). We always know what needs to be accomplished.

Meanwhile, Grace is battling his own self doubt. We see this in the present but mainly in the flashbacks, where he’s constantly signaling that he doesn’t believe in himself.

For the relationships, there’s conflict with Rocky, particularly in their inability to communicate at first. A big chunk of the second act is solving that problem.

And the obstacles continue to be thrown at our heroes. I mean how’s this for an obstacle: At one point, Rocky dies.

This relationship-conflict map applies to character pieces as well. In Poor Things, the conflict comes from Duncan constantly trying to control Bella, somebody who is fundamentally uncontrollable.

But both movies understand the same principle. Conflict pushes the second act forward.

We know Grace and Rocky cannot save the galaxy unless they learn to communicate. Therefore we are deeply invested in them learning how to communicate.

That’s where yesterday’s script, The Mold, really fell apart. The central conflict between Bri and Mac remained unclear for far too long. We know they used to be together, but we’re fuzzy on who broke up with who and why. We’re also unclear on the role of Bri’s ex and why he matters.

Once conflict within a character AND BETWEEN CHARACTERS becomes muddy, a screenplay can unravel surprisingly fast.

5) You’re probably putting in less effort than necessary

I’ve gotten to the point where, when I read a script, I can teleport into the writer’s mind and see what they were thinking.

A screenplay is not just a story. It’s a breadcrumb trail of the effort the writer put into it.

A lazy sentence tells me the writer doesn’t care about details. And if they don’t care about details at the sentence level, that laziness usually extends into the plotting and character work as well.

A generic scene halfway through the screenplay (some paint by numbers car chase or argument scene) tells me the writer is tiring out. They’re no longer pushing themselves creatively.

Writers think they’re getting away with this stuff.

They’re not.

Readers can feel when the effort level drops. And eventually that drop catches up to the screenplay.
One trick you can use is to rank every scene on a scale from 1 to 10. Be brutally honest. Are those late second act scenes scoring 7s and 8s? Or are they scoring 3s and 4s?

If the scenes are weak, figure out why.

Sometimes you were simply lazy in your scene choice. Other times the issue is structural. Maybe your protagonist no longer wants the goal badly enough. And once that desire weakens, every subsequent scene suffers.

6) Finishing the script is not the prize

I remember when I used to finish writing scripts and feel this huge sense of accomplishment.
But all I’d really accomplished was typing “The End.”

Anybody can reach The End weakly. Anybody can stumble there with half baked scenes and no structure.

The real accomplishment is getting there while giving the screenplay everything you possibly had.
Newer writers especially tend to celebrate completion instead of execution.

So let’s summarize.

Let your idea sit long enough to prove it has staying power. Make sure the concept has enough fuel to sustain an entire screenplay. Outline as much as possible, especially the second half. Build characters whose internal and external conflicts can generate scenes all the way through the ending. Be honest about your effort level. And don’t celebrate simply finishing the screenplay. Celebrate finishing it well.

A couple of final thoughts.

I understand that everybody has time limitations. We don’t all have endless months to work on a screenplay. I get that. All I’m asking is that you put forth the maximum amount of effort with the time you do have. If you can honestly say you did that, then you’ve done your job. After that, it’s up to the script gods.

And if you’re not an outline person, that’s okay. But then you need to become a draft demon. Your early drafts will be about discovery. Figuring out what the movie actually is. Then you refine and sharpen it through subsequent drafts.

But understand that you will probably need more drafts overall than someone who outlines. And if that process works better for you creatively, great. You just need to give yourself the time to do it.

What about you guys? Where do you think screenplays fall apart? And how do you fix the problem?

The Blood & Ink Horror Script Contest is a unique screenplay contest where you had to earn your way into the contest with a good enough concept. I accepted just under 100 entries. Those writers had half a year to write their scripts. And now, the judging begins!

Genre: Horror/Comedy
Premise: A killer space mold terrorizes a small town during their local cheese festival and threatens the lives of a food journalism intern and her cheesemonger-in-training ex-boyfriend.
About: You have until 11:59pm tonight (Tuesday) to get your Blood & Ink entry in. Now, let me remind you how this contest will work going forward. I’m going to read all the Blood & Ink scripts and then I’m going to review the Top 10, starting at 10 and working my way up, over the course of two weeks. When will this start? Optimistically, in 1 month. More realistically? 2 months. In the meantime, I may review a Blood & Ink script here and there on the site. I’m too excited not to! If these early reviews end up being Top 10 Worthy, the reviews will reappear during the Top 10 Review fortnight.
Writer: Eric Levin
Details: 85 pages

The Blood & Ink Contest is off and running!

Actually, some of these entries are running faster than I can keep up with. Which is a problem because they were never accepted in the first place!

Let me remind everyone that your concept needed to be accepted into the contest. It’s not an “anyone can enter” situation. That’s probably my fault for not being clearer about that but now it’s going to take some work to figure out and remember which concepts got accepted and which didn’t.

Because I know there were a good dozen or so concepts that I would not have accepted but they did get voted in via one of the other secret ways into the contest.

Okay, moving on to today’s script. This was one of the loglines that made me smile the brightest so I thought it would be a good one to start with.

20-something Bri and her ex-boyfriend, 20-something Mac, are headed to upstate New York because Bri is writing an article about the Finger Lakes Cheese Festival. She’s brought her ex along because he is a cheesemonger apprentice and can help her understand this world. If the article is good, she’ll be promoted to an official journalist at the paper.

What neither of them know yet is, not far from the festival, an alien meteorite has crashed into a farm and has started spreading killer mold. The only thing we know about this mold, early on, is that light kills it.

Bri and Mac immediately visit one of the many cheese farms in the area. That’s where they meet 20-something Lyla, who is excited that two big New Yorkers have come up to write about their little cheese festival. Later, they will run into Jason, Bri’s bad boy ex-boyfriend.

They get to the festival just as a lunar eclipse occurs and that gives the alien mold exactly three minutes to wreak its havoc. And boy does it take advantage. It eats up a good dozen people at the festival. Bri and Mac are able to escape to her farm. But the night is fast approaching. So, even though the eclipse is over, it’s only a matter of time before the mold strikes again.

Eventually, the mold is able to take form into an alien creature. The only way to stop this creature, apparently, is by singing to it. So Mac is able to save himself repeatedly by singing to mold monster just before he attacks. Meanwhile, Bri gets beamed up to an alien spaceship and learns from the piloting alien that he loves coming to planets and destroying them with his pet mold.

Somehow, Bri is going to have to escape this ship if she’s to save Mac, who’s been placed in a mold web by the mold monster. Apparently, Mac’s singing is only going to save him for so long. And it’s a long ways away from sunrise…

So??

How was our first Blood & Ink entry???

Here’s what I liked about The Mold. It’s an old school premise that delivers in an old school way. And it’s something you could see becoming a movie. These types of horror-comedy setups are perfect. They never die. And this is an original enough take on the sub-genre to stand out.

I loved the cheese stuff.

There’s something in screenwriting I like to call “doggy bag” moments. They are things you can teach the audience about your subject matter for them to “take home in a doggy bag.” There’s a lot of that here with the cheese. We go really in depth with how to make cheese early on and I felt like I learned a bunch.

I loved how Eric SHOWED instead of TOLD when it came to his mold rules. For example, when we see the mold first spread through the shade and see it hit a patch of sunlight, it instantly dies. Now we know that rule: the mold dies by sunlight.

A lot of times writers will get lazy and try to fit those rules in via dialogue. It’s always better if you show as opposed to tell. The reader understands the rules 100x better that way.

I also thought the setup was strong. I was gearing up for this cheese festival. I was curious what was going to happen. The script almost had this “Sideways” vibe to it, except that, instead of wine, we were dealing with cheese.

However, once the mold became a focus for the screenplay, the script lost something. All the specificity (about cheeses) was gone. A lot of what made the story feel original was gone. It essentially became “People run away from mold.”

And I know that’s the point. But that’s the challenge with writing a screenplay. You don’t just give us the obvious execution of the idea. You gotta figure out ways to make it exciting and dramatic and scary and entertaining. And not enough effort was put into making that happen.

There isn’t a single great mold kill in this movie. And there needs to be about five of them. They’re all pretty bland. Mold approaches. Person tries to get away from it. They fail. Mold overcomes them. That can’t be every single kill. There’s got to be more variety. There’s got to be more imagination.

But the real problem with the script is the main core of characters. No character had a flaw that was explored well. Brie kind of had this flaw where she leaves when things get tough. But, unlike the mold rules, this is told to us rather than shown to us, and therefore, it doesn’t stick.

The miss here was the Brie, Mac, and Lyla triangle. The way the dynamic should’ve been written is that Brie left Mac. She broke up with him for whatever reason you want to use. And the two are friends now but Mac is clearly still in love with her. And, originally, he’s hoping this trip will allow him to get her back.

But then they meet Lyla and Brie watches in dismay as Mac and Lyla have amazing chemistry together and, all of a sudden, she realizes she lost the prize. Now she’s trying to get him back but maybe Mac has finally moved on. What’s going to happen here?? That’s a much stronger character dynamic to play with.

The Jason stuff was weak and barely explained. A lot of it didn’t even make sense (Brie broke up with Mac because Jason destroyed her confidence several years earlier???). I don’t even know why you’d want Jason in this movie unless he’s a complete asshole who we’re rooting for to die.

The second half of the script shows a pretty steep dive in quality and, unfortunately, I’m expecting a lot of that from these entries. I talked about this in an article recently. We over-focus on our first acts and don’t put the same amount of time into the later parts of the script.

The stuff with the mold turning into a monster isn’t bad but needed a more natural build-up. The alien character felt like he was from a totally different movie. He was too wacky. He didn’t feel calibrated or tonally consistent with everything else.

Another big missing opportunity was the cheese! We spend the entire first 30 pages hyping up cheese. But then cheese never appears in the script again. It’s odd. I think that cheese should somehow be the only weapon to defeat the mold. Certain cheeses do better than others at holding it back. That way, all that setup can actually be paid off.

And I would’ve loved more time at the festival. More time meeting some of the wacky people who inhabit this cheese universe. I felt like we rushed past that.

But hey! That’s the great thing about screenwriting. You can rewrite and make the script better. Hopefully, Eric sees some value in the problems I’ve identified. If you want to prioritize, start with the characters. Nothing matters until that’s squared away. Better flaws for Brie and Mac and work that new love triangle. It’s going to make this so much better!

Script Link: The Mold

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: If you’re going to kill a bad person, get the most out of it by setting up that they’re a bad person! That’s half the fun! There’s a scene in the grocery store where the customers don’t know about the mold yet. And this woman comes rushing in and slams the door shut. When a customer wants to leave, she won’t let him go out there. He says, “I have places to be you crazy bitch,” pushes past her, goes outside, and is dead ten seconds later. You could’ve spent a page building this character up as an asshole. He’s being a dick to one of the workers. He’s calling the checker stupid for a mistake she made. NOW when that guy gets killed, we’re going to FEEL SOMETHING.  That’s what you’re trying to do in scripts. Is make people feel something. If you rush past the setup of any character, even small ones, we won’t feel anything when they engage with your story.

For the first person who e-mails me the answer to this trivia question, I will give them super-discounted $199 script notes. What is the most famous spec script ever sold that had a strong focus on cheese?? E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you know the answer. Put “TRIVIA” in the subject line. NOBODY WRITE THE ANSWER IN THE COMMENTS UNTIL 2PM PACIFIC WEDNESDAY!

Is it possible to write something great with only strong plotting or only strong character creation? Or do you need both?

Devil Wears Prada 2. 77 million bucks. That’s a great haul! It’s about what everyone’s expecting the new Star Wars movie to make. At a cost of one-third that production. So, I’d say that’s a pretty sweet performance.

Here’s what I’ll say about the success of this movie. It’s nice to see that Hollywood has gone back to embracing genres geared towards women as opposed to trying to make women like everything men like. Devil Wears Prada, Wicked, Wuthering Heights, The Housemaid, It Ends With Us.

Hollywood damn near lost their minds for a while, determined to make women like Star Wars, Ghostbusters, and every single comedy released. It’s okay to gear stuff towards men and gear stuff towards women. We’re different and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. So, thank God the adults are back in the room making these decisions. They’re paying off big time.

Okay, moving on.

Baby Reindeer was awesome.

No lies detected.

But one of the most fascinating low-key stories in Hollywood has been that Richard Gadd, one of a tiny group of people in this day and age to break out amongst the new-school fractured media landscape, had built almost his entire breakout show around his real life, and would now have to create a new show without that crutch.

Basing things on your real life makes writing stories a lot easier because, with writing, one of the hardest things to do is create characters that feel like real people doing real things. It takes countless drafts to move away from the generic placeholders we inject into those early drafts. “This happened to me” stories don’t have to go through that process. The characters feel real right away. The situations feel real immediately.

For example, the trans stuff in Baby Reindeer would’ve never worked if it weren’t a part of Gadd’s own life. Not that you can’t put trans characters into a script but, if you’re constructing Baby Reindeer as a fictional stalking thriller, it wouldn’t make sense to go in that direction. It was only because Gadd had experienced that during his life, that the wild left turn still felt organic to the story.

Even the title itself, “Baby Reindeer” made no sense. It was used strictly because the real life person who that stalking character was based on used to call Richard Gadd that name. That’s the power of basing something on your real life. You will write way more originally because everything you write will be specific to what you experienced. And your experience is always going to be different than everyone else’s.

This is why I encourage writers to look for the truth in a moment. Because that’s where you’re going to find the most authentic (and therefore original) stuff. For example, if you’re writing a scene about your characters fighting while doing the dishes, you want to try and think back to a moment in your own life that was as similar to that moment as possible. You then want to identify what was said and what was done and try to bring as much of it to the scene as possible.

These days, the times I struggle the most to write are the times when I can’t find a real-life equivalent that I can draw upon to help me connect with the scene in an authentic way. If I’m just making it all up in my mind, I know I’m subconsciously drawing upon familiar tropes from other stories that I’ve watched or read. So I know the scene isn’t going to be true.

I resisted watching Half Man for a couple of weeks because it just looked too damn serious. And it didn’t have the hook of Baby Reindeer. The hook of Baby Reindeer was, “Woman becomes obsessed with you and starts stalking you.” That’s a scenario that everybody is familiar with. Half Man is a lot less clear. I guess it’s about two brothers who hate each other but also love each other? Ehh. Not as sexy of a hook, that’s for sure.

What ultimately got me to watch the pilot episode was that curiosity of whether Gadd would be able to create something out of nothing. Cause that’s a whole different ball of wax from what he did before. And, to me, it’s true writing. When you’re creating something out of nothing, it is the most challenging yet beautiful exploration of the medium. I have immense respect for anyone who does it well.

So, how did he do?

Half Man begins with a mild mannered guy named Niall about to get married. At his wedding, his “friend,” slash “brother,” Ruben, takes him to a private room and starts beating the shit out of him.

We then cut back to 20 years ago, where teenage Ruben moves into teenage Niall’s apartment because their moms are having a secret relationship. Ruben also joins Niall at his high school, helping scare away all the bullies who used to tee off on Niall.

But there’s a price that comes with that. Ruben is a constant ticking time bomb. He’s not only physically explosive, but seems to have some deep set sexual deviancy in him as well. So the fact that he sleeps in the same room as Niall creates a constant need for Niall to be on guard.

If there’s a “plot” to the episode, it’s that Ruben isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and is in danger of being kicked out of school. It will be up to Niall to keep him from failing out.

I’ll start by answering my earlier question. Halfway through the pilot, I asked myself, “What is this show about?” Sure, it’s about two half-brothers who have conflict with each other. But, that’s not a story. That’s character work. Where’s the story?

For example, I was watching the big new buzzy show over on Apple TV, Widow’s Bay. THAT has a story. A slew of ghosts and creatures move in on sleepy island town forcing its skeptical mayor to cover up the supernatural visitations so that he can finally turn the town into a top tourist destination. THAT’S a story.

It’s not that you can’t build a show around a plotless narrative. But it sure as hell makes it more difficult. Because without a story to push things forward, the only scenes that can shine are the scenes with the brothers in conflict. Over 8 episodes and 25 scenes per episode, that’s 200 scenes you have to write. Are you going to write 200 scenes of brothers in conflict?

Here’s what I’ll give creator Gadd. He has a killer ability to create discomfort. Every single scene, I can feel myself tensing up. I’m not sure that I enjoy that feeling. And I’m not sure I want to keep feeling that every single week. But the large majority of the stuff I read makes me feel nothing because it’s either safe or predictable. To make the viewer feel something is a key component of being a good writer.

The pilot’s best scene has Niall asleep one night and Ruben brings a girl home and they start going at it in the bed next to Niall. When they sense Niall is awake, Ruben has the girl get up and straddle him, ultimately resulting in Niall’s first sexual experience.

Everything about the scene is uncomfortable. From the way they tease Niall’s inexperience, to the way that Ruben helps the experience along. It’s a scene that reminded me of what made Baby Reindeer so great.

But a non-negotiable with me is story. And, quite frankly, this show doesn’t have one. The art of great storytelling is a marriage of both character AND plot. If you only have one, it feels like something’s missing. The show can only move at a certain pace. And I’m not sure I’m willing to spend 7 more hours watching uncomfortable tension for one great scene per episode. If there were a larger story being built here, that may be different. But there isn’t. And so, Half Man probably won’t get a second viewing from me.

That image there represents the screenplay I reviewed in this month’s newsletter. That script comes from the hottest writer-director in Hollywood at the moment. The man is single-handedly setting up project after project. And this is his buzzy ascension into a brand new genre. To give you some insight into my reaction, I gave this script a rating I’VE NEVER GIVEN BEFORE. So, you’re definitely going to want to check this out.

Other topics in this month’s newsletter include me admitting I was wrong about something. I know. Shocker of the century. Some new writing insights into the future of AI (writing scripts is going to radically change). An update on that buzzy new 180 page hero’s journey amateur screenplay I read, now with more story detail! Timothee Chalamet (of course). How to actually write flashbacks that work. And my final thoughts on the run-up to the May release of Mandalorian and Grogu.

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Once you read it, share your thoughts below!