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: Hour-long Drama
Premise: (from writer) In a world where superheroes are real, a shell-shocked journalist obsessively follows the exploits of a city’s new vigilante. All the President’s Men meets Heroes.
About: (from the writer) I’m a comic book nerd and I wanted to see what happens between the panels, to the people who have to live in a world of super-powered battles. The series will follow a vigilante, but through the eyes of a normal newspaper reporter, Eugene McGuire. The catch is that McGuire isn’t starry-eyed over the superheroes of his world. He doesn’t trust them. And if no one else is going to question these “walking weapons of mass destruction”, he will. Moreover, in The Times, figuring out the vigilante’s identity will be half the draw of the show. It’s the story that we would see if Superman was about Lois Lane.
Writer: Kyle Jones
Details: 55 pages
So how has Amateur TV Week been going so far? Not bad, I suppose. It’s forcing me to look harder at what’s on TV and why those shows are on TV and what kind of script to write to also get on TV. There’s definitely a similarity to looking for amateur features. A lot of the writers and pilots are pretty good. But “pretty good” isn’t good enough. This is the top of the heap. This is fucking Hollywood. Your pilot needs to knock someone over to get noticed. And too many of the pilots I’ve read feel like those safe middle-of-the-road episodes you get in the middle of the season that pass the time until the good season-ending stuff comes. They’re polite. But they’re not a PILOT. A pilot’s got to engross you. It’s gotta be fucking exciting or earth-shattering or mind-blowing or dramatically gobsmacking. It’s got to make someone think they could build 100 episodes out of this. It’s got to make a viewer go, “Holy shit. I’m in.” You know when you love a show so much that you mentally block out the period of time next week when it’s on? That’s what a pilot needs to do.
There hasn’t been a pilot yet (from all the entries or the ones I’ve reviewed so far) that’s made me do that. Everything is about potential. And potential’s fine. Potential’s great. But you never know when potential is going to turn into fulfilled potential. So you’d prefer for a pilot to just be… ready. “The Times” felt like it could be ready. It had a big idea (superheroes) and it had a new spin (told from the perspective of mortals). And it had some tight writing. Now I’ve seen this kind of thing before. And it’s a tricky thing to get right. I mean, how are you going to convince us, in a world of really cool fucking superheroes, that it’s actually more interesting to follow a normal person? That guy better be the most fascinating person ever, because otherwise, you run the risk of a bewildered audience going, “Why aren’t we following one of the super heroes again?” Funny enough, this is the same curiosity I have for the Fall’s upcoming Avengers show. Now the advantage of that show is that they’re talking about super heroes we actually know. The Times is building its super-heroes from the ground up. Let’s see if it succeeds.
30-something Gene McGuire’s been a stellar journalist all his life. But at the moment, he’s just trying to find a job. He’s back from Afghanistan and the world over here is a little less exciting. Well that’s about to change. While at a job interview for a magazine, the building McGuire’s in blows up. Well, mostly up anyway. As McGuire stumbles around trying to save the few survivors, he sees two superheroes. One, a man who can become fire, and another, a masked vigilante.
The vigilante (superhero name: Vigilante) ends up saving McGuire but despite the near-death experience, he’s not fazed. You see, this is the world we live in. Superheroes (or meta-humans, as they’re called) run rampant. The bad ones kill people. The good ones save people. It’s kind of old hat by this point. Nobody points into the sky and says, ‘Look, it’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Superman!” It’s more like, “Is that Supes again? His hair is getting thin.”
McGuire’s quickly able to find a job at the city’s top newspaper, and starts looking into the bombing. What he finds is that the bad meta-humans were trying to destroy some biotech server on the floor below the magazine, which housed the DNA breakdown of their kind. You see, scientists are obsessed with learning the genetic code of these mutations so that, one day, anyone who wants to can become a superhero. The superheroes aren’t too keen on that.
McGuire becomes convinced that the key to finding out the deeper meaning of all this is to find Vigilante. So he heads to the recesses of the city’s underbelly where he ends up running into Fire Dude again. Fire Dude tries to kill him, but once again Vigilante comes to the rescue. Despite saving him twice now (I’m thinking he must have a human-crush on McGuire), Vigilante warns him to stop following him. He then disappears, and we’re left with McGuire. It’s clear Vigilante’s words have no effect on him. He will not be satiated until he knows who the mysterious crime-fighter is!
Okay, I’m not the president of the comic book geek squad, but I like a good comic book movie or TV show. Remember Heroes? That was awesome (for about 7 episodes – until it was clear the writers had no idea what they were doing).
The Times is a cool little pilot. But there’s something nagging at me here. There’s a certain… I don’t know… lack of sexiness. In trying to make the super hero world SOOOOOO nonchalant, I think Kyle’s actually gone too far. Part of the fun of these shows is watching the characters experience super-heroic acts for the first time and be wowed by them.
I get that that’s not this show, but I’m wondering if there’s a middle ground somewhere. Maybe a certain superhero (or villain) shows up and does something that no one’s seen before? Because otherwise, it’s all so bland. Everyone is so blasé about everything (McGuire isn’t even shaken after he’s saved by a superhero from a burning building!). And because they’re blasé about it, I’m blasé about it.
With that said, the pilot is well-written. And it does have a different take on superheroes. We’ve always known that Superman was secretly Clark Kent. That Batman was secretly Bruce Wayne. Imagine if we were one of the billions of people who didn’t know. I could see us wanting to find out.
Ahh, yet that was another issue I had with The Times. I think Kyle is banking too much on us wanting to find out the identity of Vigilante. To him, that’s going to be enough to drive interest through the entire series (or first season). I beg to differ. Remember, you’ve established that nobody cares about these superheroes (someone even says to McGuire – “No one wants to read about the Supers.”). And that blasé-ness is the exact same reason we (or at least, I) aren’t desperate to find out who he is.
So if I were Kyle, I’d try to come up with a mystery that’s much bigger. Like Lost. I want to see a bunch of people looking at a fucking big-ass thing in a forest and going, “What is this place?” I’m there for the long-haul after that. Once McGuire figured out why the building had been blown up (the supers were trying to destroy bio data), I was like, “What’s left to keep me reading?” All my questions had been answered. At that point, I was kind of done with the series.
You know, maybe it’s as simple as making Vigilante a new superhero. Instead of everyone being like, “Oh yeah, there’s that Vigilante guy again. I just saw him getting a burrito on 4th and Madison last night,” make him a new kind of superhero with a new approach. It’s the first superhero people can’t explain. Make people excited about it, wanting to know more about this guy. And because they’re excited, WE’LL be excited. And it will make sense for the story, because our main character’s a reporter. He wants to find out too (and am I the only one who’d like to see the lead change to a female for that situation? Following Lois Lane in her quest to de-mask Superman?)
Ironically, Kyle, a self-professed comic book geek, may love comic book heroes so much that he’s become numb to them. Because that’s what this feels like. I don’t feel the passion on the page that a superhero lover would have. If we can get more passion, more sexiness, a bigger feel to this comic book show (keeping the same general approach to the material) it could be really good. I’m afraid that now, it’s a few damsel-in-distresses from being a worth the read.
Script link: The Times
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I never understand these dark shadow characters giving a puzzle to our hero instead of giving them the freaking information they need! Our secret shadowy informant (who knows everything) tries to help McGuire solve his case by saying, “Go back to the beginning. There’s something you’re not seeing.” Why the puzzle? There’s no logical reason whatsoever for the character to not just TELL HIM what the answer is. Writers do this because it’s cooler but it’s not realistic. That’s movie (or TV) logic. If a character has the information our hero needs and doesn’t tell him, there has to be a reason for it. Don’t just create a puzzle to make the plot cooler. It must make sense!
