Welcome to the week where I review Amateur TV pilots. This competition was held exclusively through my weekly newsletter. To make sure you’re aware of future writing contests and opportunities, sign up for the newsletter here.
Genre: 1 hour comedy/drama
Premise: (from writers) When 15-year-old boy genius, Connor Maxworthy is fired from his job as a surgeon, he takes a job as a high school biology teacher in hopes of realizing the teenage experience he never had.
About: A last second change of plans here. The original Tuesday script, “God Dammit” is being replaced. Basically, my assistant and I went to blows over which script should be selected. She made a strong argument that Connor Maxworthy was more juvenile and that I should review something with a sharper, more intelligent sense of humor (aka “God Dammit”). But the more I thought about the two, the more I realized, god dammit, I’m juvenile. And if I was going to review a script, it was going to be one with my juvenile sense of humor. On the down side, I haven’t been able to get in touch with my assistant since making the change. If you see her, please tell her I’m sorry.
Writers: Jason Director, Ayla Harrison & Jacob Osborn
Details: 61 pages
This is one of the pilot slots I went back and forth on. It’s so hard to choose because nothing really stuck out as, “Oh my god! This is amazing!” You really had to weigh the pros and cons of each script. I was close to including one of the two below as well…
Dark Canyons – When a secretive Government flight disappears without trace over DARKCANYONS, America’s largest national park, a female Park Police officer finds herself drawn into a dark and dangerous conspiracy. Ultimately didn’t pick it because it felt a little obvious in its execution. It needed that “freshness” that really pulls you in to one of these stories.
Same DNA – Amelia’s straight-and-narrow life is rudely interrupted on the eve of her 30th birthday when her free-spirit twin sister needs a place to crash, indefinitely. Ultimately didn’t pick it because while it started out funny, it felt like the dialogue got a little too cutesy for its own sake. It stopped feeling natural.
All these pilots had their strengths and weaknesses, and that’s usually what you find with amateur material. Because the writers are still learning, they have just as much bad in their scripts as good. So it’s a real challenge when you’re forced to pick between them.
Enough about other pilots. It’s time to talk about today’s. I’ll keep it simple. I picked this because I liked Doogie Howser and I think enough time has passed since that show and the writers have put a new enough spin on the idea (Doogie teaching high school) that it’s sort of the perfect reinvention of the idea.
Connor Maxworthy is a 15 year-old doctor who’s so brilliant that even brilliant people are in awe of him. This atypical teen could perform brain surgery while eating a turkey sandwich (and not get any crumbs in the medulla umblata).
But Connor does have a weakness. He’s not very… personable. After removing a tumor during surgery, a husband and wife are horrified to learn that Connor made the man sterile in the process. They were planning to have babies. Connor’s response? Yo dude, what’s your problem? I just got rid of your cancer.
This attitude is what pisses off the hospital governing body, who are sick of hearing complaint after complaint that Connor is an arrogant, emotionless asshole. It’s the last straw. They fire him.
Connor wanders around, trying to get a job, but everyone he meets seems to have the same assessment. He may be able to perform quintouple bypass surgery but he has no idea how to communicate with patients. After Connor does some soul searching, he realizes that missing out on the high school experience MAY have hurt his social skills. So he comes up with a genius idea. Go back and teach high school. Learn how to be a kid while getting paid for it.
The local high school has its reservations about hiring a 15 year old, but Connor eventually gets a subbing job and starts teaching. Almost immediately, he runs into trouble. The students don’t respect him. The teachers hate his guts. And his own brother, a year older than him, has to deal with the embarrassing fact that his ultra-nerd sibling is a teacher at the school he attends.
Things only get worse when Connor falls for one of his students (whom he can’t have of course) and the vice-principal makes it his mission to get rid of Connor. Can Connor navigate the red-tape of high school teacher politics, win over his students, and maintain professionalism in the presence of beautiful female teenagers? Or maybe the more important question is, does he want to?
All right, let’s break something down here. This is going to make a whole lot of you roll your eyes and say, “I’m letting THIS guy judge my TV script?” But hey, I never pretended to be some TV expert (other than watching too much of it). A big reason I wanted to do this week is because I wanted to learn more about the TV format.
And the big thing I learned here is that each “Act” is the time between commercials. Therefore, at the end of every act, it’s your job to write a killer cliffhanger that will keep the viewer around during the dreaded commercial break. Because, unlike a movie, where the viewer is stuck in a theater, home viewers have more channel options than days of the year, and we usually wait til a commercial break before we decide if we want to stay with this show or move to the next one. So how a writer ends these acts is imperative. We MUST keep that person on our channel at all costs.
Connor Maxworthy was one of those pilots where I probably would’ve stayed around during all the commercial breaks, but only if I knew there was nothing else good on. And to me that brings up my biggest question about the pilot. Is this an hour show? Because I don’t know if it has enough meat to keep viewers around for 60 minutes. Part of me thinks you squeeze everything together so the jokes-per-second ratio is twice as tight and make it a half-hour. CM did, at times, have that padded feel you only see in a late-season episode of The Bachelorette (I mean, last night there was literally 100 minutes of padding to prepare us for one scene – not that I watch the show. I, um, just heard that somewhere).
Not to say there weren’t good scenes in Connor Maxworthy. I loved the scene where he’s looking for work and must accompany a doctor to a check-up on a beautiful 15 year old girl. When she undresses, Connor is stuck in a rather “erect” predicament. Or when he uses his doctor skills to save a student’s life who accidentally cuts a major artery during Dissection Day. But there were also a lot of scenes that had that “not bad, but do we really need this” feel, like Connor interviewing for the deceptive Dr. Chen (it felt forced, wasn’t a very funny situation, and basically repeated information about Connor we already knew).
As for the episode’s story, I felt that could’ve been better structured. This seemed like the kind of story where Connor hasn’t figured out this teacher thing for some reason, so he needs to solve that problem before the school gets rid of him. In order to pull this off, you need to establish the SPECIFIC CLEAR problem Connor is having at the school, so that we know exactly what he’s trying to solve. You then, preferably, have Connor come up with a clever solution to that CLEAR PROBLEM that makes us like him and makes us want to keep watching him every week.
I never really understood what Connor’s problem was at school. He seemed to have a million of them. And the “solution” is something that just dropped into his lap. He saves a student from dying, which was a nice scene, but he didn’t create the solution. It just presented itself. A pleasant coincidence rarely works in scripted stories.
Take the pilot we reviewed a few weeks ago, County, about doctors at County hospital. Very generic pilot, but one of the best parts was exactly what I was hoping for from Connor Maxworthy. The main character has a clear problem – his patient refuses a blood transfusion, which she needs to live, and because there’s no money anywhere in the hospital, he has no choice but to let this woman die. But he fights and he fights and looks for out-of-the-box alternatives and finally gets a doctor to the do the transfusion. Clear problem. Clever solution. I now like this protagonist. I wanted that same thing in this pilot.
But I liked Connor himself. I liked that he’s kind of an asshole, that he’s arrogant, that he just says what he feels. Those kinds of characters always find themselves in interesting situations because they’re drama self-starters. I like the potential love story (with the girl who he saw naked at the doctor’s office). I thought the brother stuff was okay (although something tells me it would work better if he had a popular sister). There’s potential here. It’s not a home run. But I’d love to see this thing get a shot. With the right combination of people working on it, it could be a really fun show.
Script link: Connor Maxworthy
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Live and die with the end of your act breaks. Remember that each time you end one, it’s an opportunity for your viewers to turn the channel. With that in mind, do everything in your power to make your “cliffhanger” interesting enough that they stay.
