Amateur Showdown is back, baby!
But I’m going to utilize a little writing tool I call… suspense… and make you read this entire article before I reveal the showdown genre. I’ve also programmed the post so that if you try and scroll down and check to see the genre first, the article automatically disappears. Sorry!
But don’t worry. I plan to keep you entertained in the meantime. And today, I want to talk about Emmy nominations.
Did you know there are over 500 shows on television? That’s correct. I did not accidentally add a “0.”
With that many shows, there are bound to be plenty of “snubs.” But I’m not up in arms about the fact that Yellowstone didn’t get any noms or that Atlanta was ignored for best drama. I’m more focused on the shows that kicked butt.
Succession – 25
White Lotus – 20
Ted Lasso – 20
Hacks – 17
Only Murders in the Building – 17
Euphoria – 16
Barry – 14
Dopesick – 14
Severance – 14
Squid Game – 14
Ozark – 13
Stranger Things – 13
The interesting thing about having 500 shows is that we’ve all grown more picky about what we watch. We know that, the second a show slows down, it’s an opportunity to watch some other shiny new show. A bad habit I’ve fallen victim to many times.
I have not made it through all of Succession Season 3. I didn’t feel any compelling reason to keep watching the third season of Barry. I started to see the weak writing creep into Ozark a couple of seasons ago and it’s only gotten worse since. Which is a shame because it started with so much promise.
However, I’m thrilled about White Lotus. You guys know how infatuated I was with that show. Hell, I did an entire week of articles on it (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5). I think Euphoria is operating on another level. A lot of people point out how the secret ingredient to Stranger Things is its amazing casting. And I would agree with that. But I also think Euphoria’s casting is 100 times better than Stranger Things, so much so that it’s going to be responsible for the next 20 years of movie stars. From Zendaya to Jacob Elordi to Sydney Sweeney to Angus Cloud to Hunter Schafer. They’re all sooooo good.
I love seeing Squid Game on there because I’m unapologetically an enforcer of the high concept (cough cough *ahem* – foreshadowing) and this is the highest concept show of the decade. I don’t think I’ve ever anticipated a reality show more than Squid Game. It’s going to be so much fun.
A lot of the other entries, I’m lukewarm about. I didn’t like them, I didn’t dislike them. But I have noticed this trend occurring where, somewhere around the third episode, a show either flies or falls.
This happened with Severance. It happened with The Old man. It happened with Moon Knight. It happened with Ms. Marvel.
I LOVED the pilot for all of these shows. But that’s the thing about pilots. The pilot of a series is the script that will have been worked on the most. So you usually see a dip in the second episode. And then the third episode acts as a “decider” episode. Pilot was awesome. Second episode was a letdown. Third episode tells us which one represents the true quality level of the show.
With Severance, it just started to get too weird. And I’m okay with weird. But when you match weird up with a depressing tone, which Severance embraces fully, it doesn’t get your juices flowing to continue.
The Old Man started out AMAZINGLY. It’s like, what if Jason Bourne was 70? But once it leaned into its Afghanistan plot, which turned out to be way less cool than they implied it was going to be, I was out.
Ms. Marvel is proof of just how important directing is. The Bad Boys 3 guys directed the pilot and they put so much energy into it. I literally thought we were watching the birth of the female Spider-Man. It had that same quality that Tom Holland’s Homecoming had.
But once they left, the episodes become lifeless and dull. And the mythology turned out to be really dumb. They shouldn’t have brought these ancient people into the mix. It turned what was a cool idea – a popularity-starved teenager gets superpowers yet must watch everyone else around her become social media famous – and just made it silly and unfun.
Moon Knight also had a great pilot. The whole thing where he wakes up in some town in the middle of nowhere and this cult leader is sacrificing people — it was so well done. And then it just became too crazy. He was crazy. The villain was crazy. Lots of crazy things were happening to him. He never knows who he is or what’s going on. The show didn’t have anything to ground it and therefore fell apart.
I suspect what’s happening here is that writers still haven’t figured out how to structure the 2022 version of an inaugural TV season.
It should be obvious. Most of these shows are 8 episodes long. And 8 episodes fits nicely into the three act structure. The three act structure says the first act should be 25% of the story, second act 50%, and third act 25%. Which would mean that the first act is the first 2 episodes, the second act is the next 4 episodes, and the third act is the final 2 episodes. It’s perfect, right?
The problem is that if you spend the first two episodes setting up your story, you risk the viewer checking out. Viewers need something to get excited about. So writers sort of freak out and go all-in on a big pilot episode, which now creates an imbalance in the structure. Because now there’s a natural falloff in the second episode. Which pushes us into the second act (episode 3-6) on a weak note. The turn into the second act should be one of the most exciting times in your story, as it’s the beginning of the journey.
This has led to most writers winging it, to varying results. Sometimes they make it work, like with Squid Game, and sometimes they don’t, like with The Old Man.
Even my favorite new show, The Bear, had a very quirky structure that never quite worked. There isn’t a natural thru-line to the narrative. It kind of jumps all over the place and tries ideas (today’s episode is going to be about catering!) and, if I’m being honest, the finale was a narrative nightmare. The show gave random characters who had never talked to each other entire 8 minute dialogue scenes with one another.
So why did I still like it?
It’s because with television, it always comes back to character. If you create really compelling characters, that can get you through any plotting issues. And The Bear has 5-6 really fun characters. It also was smart in making its episodes 30 minutes cause it didn’t have as much time for the narratives to crumble.
Remember that, traditionally, that’s all TV used to be, was character. You didn’t have overarching season-long plots because, back in the day, executives felt that people would forget the plots in the week between episodes. So episodes were more standalone. That’s why sit-coms were so popular, as well as procedurals. You didn’t need to know what happened last week to enjoy the standalone plot of ‘catching the killer’ this week.
But now TV seasons have become mini-movies and nobody has really figured out how to do that. Because one of the ingredients that makes a movie a movie is urgency. Things need to happen *RIGHT NOW*. 99% of TV shows don’t have that. So you’re creating a movie that sort of limps along at a casual pace. And those two worlds are hard to marry.
It’s why I think White Lotus worked so well. Because the show had that clear time-frame – one week at the White Lotus hotel. It’s not 48 hours. But it’s still short enough that we know things are coming to a head. Which propels us to keep watching. And yet White Lotus was, at its heart, a TV show, because it focused so much on character.
Which is the ultimate lesson here. When you’re writing TV, it’s got to be character 70% and plot 30%. Spend all the time you have outlining focusing on, “How do I make each one of these characters as interesting as possible?” And then if you can throw a strong plot on top of that? It’s like gravy. You’ll have a hit show.
Okay, I’ve made you wait long enough.
What is the next Amateur Showdown??
I was thinking the other day about The Hangover and how The Hangover was the last giant feature comedy hit. Why is that? Why haven’t any comedies lived up to it since? My belief is that comedies got too low-concept. They got too “Apatowed.” It was less about concept and more about peoples’ lives. The possibility of a comedy titled, “GETTING MARRIED,” was very high. What was this comedy about? It was about the hilarious shenanigans involved in people getting married.
I’m not saying that can’t be funny. But where is the creativity in that concept? It’s a 3 out of 10, at best. The Hangover was a mega-hit, at least in part, because it was a genuinely clever concept.
Now, don’t worry. We’re not doing a comedy showdown. I’ve learned that us Scriptshadow types aren’t good with comedy. We are all very unfunny people, lol. However, that realization reminded me of how powerful the high concept is. And I believe that the high concept is on its way back. We just saw it with the sale of Classified. That’s only going to drive more studios to look for high concept material.
Is “high concept” a genre? Not really. But that’s why I want to use it. It’s something that can be used in almost every genre, which gives you a lot of flexibility for ideas to come up with.
So…
THE NEXT AMATEUR SHOWDOWN
Genre: High-Concept
When: December 1, 2022
Include: Title, genre, logline, Why Your Script Should be Chosen, a PDF of the screenplay
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Start?: You can start sending in your entries right now!
