In a shocking upset, Now You See Me defeated The Running Man, which only pulled in 17 million dollars for the weekend.
See, this is why I don’t like it when Hollywood shoves someone in our faces. It isn’t organic. It doesn’t feel genuine. And when you shove someone in front of our eyes and you say, “You must now accept this person as a movie star,” we’re going to push back. Being a movie star is literally the hardest thing to achieve in existence. It must be earned. And Glen Powell hasn’t earned it.
Also, these aspiring movie stars don’t have any clue how to become a movie star anymore. The way it’s done is that you find the genre that audiences love you in and you make a bunch of movies in that genre, with slight variations here and there. THEN, about 5-7 years into your career, you branch out and try more challenging material, like weird indie films and such. And the great thing is, if you suck at that, you’ve already established a lane that people love you in, so you can go back to it.
But these new impatient Millennial and Gen-X wannabe movie stars try to be everything right away and confuse the hell out of audiences. Glen Powell breaks out in a romantic comedy. Then he does a weird TV comedy. Now he’s doing this action film. He hasn’t established himself enough for us to give him that leniency.
Does the 1-2 failed punch of Chad Powers and Running Man mean the end of Glen Powell’s career before it even started? No. He’s got one more shot. Ghostwriter, which is going to be JJ Abrams big return to directing, has him as a sci-fi novelist whose sci-fi worlds start coming to life. If that bombs, then yes, it’s over. He’s Eric Bana.
Glen Powell would also benefit from some media training. He comes off as way too rehearsed and he doesn’t seem to show any genuine parts of himself at all. I wish you luck Glenny boy.
But what I would really like to talk you about today is the third episode of Pluribus. You guys know I can’t stop talking about the importance of the third episode of a TV series and how it is the single most accurate indicator of whether a show is going to succeed or not.
Because what the third episode tells you is whether you really have a TV show. The first episode is a mini-movie that sets up the concept and asks a few questions. The second episode is a natural extension of the fallout from the first episode, usually initiated by the cliffhanger from episode 1.
But two major shifts happen in the third episode. One, you shift to a different writer. The creator writes the first two episodes. The number 1 staff writer writes episode 3. So you’re going to your bench, and the bench’s performance is the real determinant of whether your show is going to be good. Cause the bench will be writing the majority of your show.
And then the other shift is that episode 3 is the first episode that the writer hasn’t meticulously planned yet. They know exactly what episode 1 is going to look like. They’ve beat out 90% of episode 2. But no creators ever think about episode 3 ahead of time other than in abstract terms.
But more than anything else, episode 3 is the first episode where you’re settling into the long walk that is a TV show. What are your week-to-week episodes going to look like? Episode 3 gives us our first peek at that. And if you don’t have a show that can generate consistently strong plot and character beats, we’re going to start seeing it here.
Which, unfortunately, is something I noticed right away in the third episode of Pluribus. By the way, why am I so focused on Pluribus? Because it’s the first show since Severance that has the potential to be a smart entertaining science-fiction show. These are rare. So, when they come around, I grab my praying emoji hands and I blanket my screen with them.
The third episode of Pluribus starts with a literal cold open flashback of Carol and her girlfriend (who died in episode 1) taking a vacation at an ice hotel. After that, we have Carol flying back from Europe after meeting the six other English-speaking people on earth who haven’t been affected by the virus. That meeting was a disaster so now Carol is going home.
While on the plane, she decides, of the five non-English-speaking people remaining, one is worth giving a shot to. So she calls him several times but he keeps hanging up on her, presumably because he thinks she might be one of the “collective.”
So Carol goes home to New Mexico, and sits at home watching TV when she hears a car outside. She heads out, sees the car screech away, and sees that they left her a hot dinner. She calls her personal concierge (who’s been modeled to look like Carol’s dream woman in the hopes of making Carol happy) and tells her she doesn’t want them giving her food.
The next day, she goes to her fancy healthy grocery store, Sprouts, only to find that there’s no food in it anymore. The concierge informs her that the world has consolidated all of the food to make it easier to get to people. Carol bitches at her and says she wants her Sprouts by the end of the week. She hangs up and, within a couple of minutes hears trucks approaching. She then watches as a dozen semi trucks and a hundred people quickly restock the entire Sprouts. Carol has her grocery store back.
She goes back home and on one of her many frustrated phone calls with the collective, sarcastically mentions she wishes she had a grenade. A couple of minutes later, her concierge shows up with a grenade. Carol and the concierge then get in a fight, Carol accidentally pulls the pin from the grenade, the concierge freaks out, grabs it and throws it out the window, but becomes injured in the subsequent explosion.
Carol then rushes the concierge to the hospital. While she’s being tended to, another collective member checks in on Carol and their conversation segues back to the fact that they idiotically gave her a live grenade. This prompts Carol to ask them what they won’t give her. A bazooka? Yes, they’d give it to her. A tank? Yes, they’d give it to her. A nuclear bomb? They hesitate a little on this one but… yes, they would ultimately give it to her. And that’s it. That’s the end of the episode.
I went into detail on all the major moments from the episode here for a reason. I want you to understand why the third episode doesn’t work as well as the first two, and why it’s such a bad omen for the remainder of the show.
Before we do that, however, I want to establish why the first two episodes worked. In the first episode, we have a clear storyline. The shit hits the fan and our main character has to deal with it. It’s a simple story structure and a very effective one. Remember, stories don’t have to be big and complex to be good. Quite the opposite. The best stories are often simple.
The second episode uses a goal set up from the first episode to drive its story. There are six English speaking people in the world other than Carol who have not gotten the virus. Naturally, Carol wants to meet them so they can figure out if there’s anything they can do to destroy the collective. So she flies to Europe to meet them.
What I want you to pay attention to here is how a strong goal with high stakes can give you a good episode of television. Because that’s what gives you a STORY. Someone trying to acheive an important goal and running into obstacles is a story. And it’s a very easy structure to build a 55 minute episode around.
The first thing you’ll notice about episode 3, is that unlike episodes 1 & 2, there is no overarching plotline propelling the episode forward. I knew the episode was in trouble the second the cold open started: a flashback to Carol on a vacation with her girlfriend.
What did this scene do to push the overall narrative forward? Nothing. It is dead time. The writers would argue that it’s giving us more information about our characters, which presumably, would make us care more for them. But that’s not true. It doesn’t tell us anything new about them at all. Never use a flashback if it tells us something we already know or that we could’ve already assumed.
Then we cut to the actual story part of the episode and, unlike the first two episodes, you’ll notice that no big goal emerges. Carol is on a plane bummed out that nobody else wants to try and save the world with her. Then, almost as an afterthought, she decides to get in touch with one of the non-collective individuals who wasn’t at the meeting.
Because this is something Carol decides to do on the spot, it has zero stakes attached to it. That’s a good screenwriting lesson you can take away right now. If a character is doing something they only thought of several minutes ago, the stakes of that action are going to be lower than ground level. We won’t care.
When Carol gets home, she’s got nothing to do! And this was the first moment where I really noticed that the screenwriting was in trouble. If we’re two hours into your 60 hour series and your main character doesn’t have anything to do, that’s a BAD OMEN.
It only gets worse from there. The big plot point that arrives next is… they deliver dinner to Carol? THAT’S your big plot point to jump-start the episode’s narrative?? Oof, that’s bad news. You’re trying to convince me to be entertained by Carol not wanting food? Something – by the way – that they’re already established in the previous episodes! So beyond it being a weak plot development on its own, it’s a redundant one too.
The high point of the episode is Carol going to the empty grocery store and the collective refilling the entire store for her. It’s a fun sequence, without a doubt. But it’s fool’s gold. It’s the kind of thing that, when you’re writing the episode and you’re worried that not enough is going on, you point to that sequence and say, “Yeah, but I have this great sequence here.”
A sequence in an episode that has no connection to any plot is not a good thing. If anything, it highlights that you don’t have a story running through your episode.
Then Carol goes home again. She watches TV again (more time where your hero has nothing to do!!! in only the third episode!!!). And then we introduce this grenade subplot. Carol gets in a fight with the concierge and the grenade goes off and the concierge is injured.
Let me just say that the concierge has already been injured TWICE in this show. So this is the third time. Beyond all the problems I’m listing here, you’re also repeating yourself. But even beyond that, I rolled my eyes when this happened because now Carol is taking her to the hospital. And that’s the kind of plot development you bust out when you’re running out of ideas. It literally felt like the writer was making up the story as he went along.
The most important point to take from all this is that THERE IS NO UNIFYING PLOT THREAD PUSHING THIS EPISODE ALONG. Notice how we’re just moving from random development to random development. That’s a major sign that an episode is poorly written.
You need one overarching plotline to push the episode along because, without that, you put your characters in this compromising position by which the only way to make the story dramatic is to come up with these little miniature inciting incidents that get your character reacting — like realizing she can call another of the 11 humans, like delivering her food, like giving her a grenade, like the concierge getting injured.
This was my whole worry after watching the pilot — that there wasn’t a clear path where extended plotlines could be built for the characters. With Pluribus failing the Scriptshadow Episode 3 test, it is now perilously close to imploding.
So, here’s what needs to happen for it to save itself. For one, NO MORE FLASHBACKS. If we see another flashback in episode 4, this series is done. Because it means they’re trying to fill up space. They don’t have enough plot so they need ANY SCENES THEY CAN FIND to get them to an acceptable running time.
But the main thing is they need to get back to using episodes as self-contained stories like they did the first and second episodes. This is why Gray’s Anatomy and CSI and The Good Wife can generate so many episodes so effortlessly. Because each episode generates a medical issue that needs solving, or a case that needs winning, or a murder that needs investigating.
You don’t have that luxury when you’ve written a serialized show. So it requires you to come up with that driving central force at the beginning of each episode. If you don’t, you run into the problem Pluribus ran into here. Without an overarching narrative, you’re writing a ‘grasping at straws’ narrative whether you like to or not. What little desperate plot beat can you think of now that will get you through another 8 pages?
It’s a simple solution, guys. Build a full story structure into every episode!
Did anybody see The Running Man or Pluribus Episode 3? If so, what did you think??
