Talk about being a victim of your own success. Thunderbolts had a respectable 76 million dollar opening this weekend. Respectable if you’re any other franchise besides Marvel. Of course the industry is trying to prop this up as a win but when the last Marvel film, Brave New World, universally accepted as a bomb, opened to 88 million, you have to be honest with yourself. It’s not looking good for this band of superhero misfits.
I’m still on the fence about whether to see the film. I may check it out today or tomorrow based on what some of you say. So, if you saw the film, leave me a quick “recommend” or “don’t recommend” in the comments section. If there’s some genuine enthusiasm there, that should push me over the top.
I was a big fan of the show, “Beef,” and I believe that’s the same team that made this movie, right? So there’s got to be some level of quality there. I just feel bad for them cause they’re working with such an uninteresting group of superheroes. When the strongest guy on your team is “Mechanical Arm Guy,” you are playing with a severe handicap. But maybe that’s the point. These are underdogs. They’re not supposed to be the best.
If you’re looking for something a lot more energetic and exciting, I recommend checking out the 2023 show, Rabbit Hole, on Paramount Plus. My buddy Grok helped me discover it. It looks to be one of these shows that was canceled not because of its quality but because they just never gave it any publicity. The show is shockingly good. So much so that I challenge anyone to watch the first episode and not get hooked.
I don’t want to spoil too much but it follows this guy named John Weir (Keifer Sutherland), who specializes in corporate espionage. He finds clever ways for giant companies to take down other companies, or steal from them, or get them to implode. But, as a result of this unique job, John is always paranoid. He doesn’t trust anybody, as he figures everyone is trying to screw over everybody else in some way. Then, a sequence of insane events occurs (I’m talking more insane than in any TV pilot you’ve ever seen) that force him to trust those around him if he’s going to survive.
The reason the series is so fun is that you don’t know which way is up or down. You’re just as lost as the characters. And the writers, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, always keep you on your toes. This thing has so many twists and turns, I advise not going out afterwards, as you will have real-world vertigo. Now, usually when there are this many twists and turns, the story eventually collapses. If everything is a mystery wrapped in an enigma and nothing is tangible, the wheels fall off. But I’m 5 episodes in now and the wheels are as sturdy as ever. The writers really thought this through.
From a writing perspective, it’s a good example of how to write a compelling TV protagonist. If a character is at war with himself, he is always compelling no matter what scene he’s in. John Weir has lived such a screwed up life that he doesn’t trust anybody. But, because of the situation he’s been put in, he has to trust some people. Cause he can’t do it by himself. Therefore, every scene he’s in, he’s looking at the person across from him and thinking, “Are they telling me the truth?”
And what’s fun about the show is that the person across from him very well might be lying. There’s a female character he teams up with, Hailey, who proves to him time and time again that she’s loyal. And yet a part of us is still looking at her, thinking, “I don’t know. Maybe she is playing him.” So his paranoia rubs off on us, breaking that fourth wall.
More importantly, though, I read a bunch of TV pilots where the main character has no conflict within themselves. And that’s a quick way to write a boring character. To be clear, you don’t HAVE TO inject an inner conflict into your hero. But I find that it helps tremendously in TV because TV is more character driven. There are more scenes of characters standing around talking. So, if there isn’t inner conflict, those scenes can easily become boring.
True, you can create conflict BETWEEN characters in a scene, and if it’s done well, that will be enough. But why have only one source of conflict in a scene when you can have two? Conflict within the character and conflict between the characters.
What sucks about Rabbit Hole is that it didn’t get picked up for a second season and I get the impression that these guys wrote this giant sprawling narrative that I’m never going to see. I’m worried that the final episode is going to be some big cliffhanger to a shocking reveal that was never filmed. But the show is so good that I don’t care. I want to watch the whole season. And, for anyone who likes that buzzy show, Paradise, on Hulu, the writers of Rabbit Hole are heavily involved in that series.
Finally, this weekend, I checked out Four Seasons, on Netflix, mainly because I like Steve Carell and will watch anything he’s in. It was also written by Tina Fey. I’m not a huge Tina Fey fan, but in the working writer community, she’s a God. People absolutely love her. So I was hoping the combination of those two things would make this work.
But there was a third reason I wanted to check it out. Back when I got into screenwriting, this type of narrative was my jam! By the way, Four Seasons is a TV show but it’s based on a feature film from the 80s. So I’m going to speak of it from a feature standpoint.
I used to love weird unique narrative formats in screenwriting. I liked Memento. I liked Run Lola Run. I liked Pulp Fiction. So, a movie like Four Seasons was right up my alley. Instead of a traditional “a to b” narrative, the movie was divided up into four sections, each representing a season where the same group of characters would meet. It’s kind of a fun way to show the passage of time and this is the same thing Tina Fey did with the TV show (which is 8 episodes long – every 2 episodes is dedicated to one season).
But, these days, I don’t like these formats as much because I find them gimmicky. I’m not saying they don’t work. But going into a script like Four Seasons is a lot more challenging because you’re working with a format that hasn’t been battle-tested. So every scene, every sequence, every season, is a gamble. You’re hoping it all works but you have no idea cause you’re flying blind.
Also, one of the things I’ve personally discovered over the years is that urgency is a pivotal component to storytelling. The less urgent your story is, the more it sits there, collecting dust, as it plods along. As a perfect example, Run Lola Run understood this. It’s one of the most urgent screenplays ever. I don’t think it’s an accident, then, that the director, Tom Tykwer, never made anything half as good after that. He moved into slower narrative stortyelling and it destroyed his screenplays.
Films like Four Seasons are particularly susceptible to this. They’re less a narrative than they are an experiment. That was the biggest leap I made as a screenwriter ever, when I stopped looking at scripts as experiments and started looking at them as movies meant to entertain people. Once you go into “experiment” territory, you’re basically saying, “I’m writing this for myself and I don’t care what anybody else thinks.” Which is not how good movies are made.
Maybe this is why Tina Fey got the idea to remake Four Seasons as a TV show. Because she knew that, being so character driven, it would work better as a TV show.
So, did it?
It KIND OF works. But here’s the real problem with the show: IT’S HARMLESS. And, sometimes, harmless is worse than bad. Because harmless means that we’re not pushing anything in the series. We’re not pushing the plot. We’re not pushing the characters. We’re not pushing the dialogue. We’re not pushing the voice. Every creative choice here is so safe, no height requirement is needed to ride.
I’m not saying every show has to be edgy. But if you’re going to make something that resonates with people, at least ONE ASPECT of your show should be pushing something. For example, Rabbit Hole, which I just mentioned. That show pushes “twists and turns” to a whole new level. Game of Thrones, at least originally, was ruthless. It would kill off major characters in its very first episode! The most recent TV darling, Adolescence, pushed the envelope narratively and cinematically, where every episode was a single shot in real time. White Lotus was constantly pushing boundaries.
So when you have this show, in Four Seasons, that just wants to lightly rub your arm for 4 hours, it kinda feels like, “What’s the point?” If you only wanted to barely entertain us, why waste 2 years of your life putting this together and shooting it?
Now, that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it! We all have that friend who’s just casually there and is in a semi-good mood all the time, so there’s comfort in him being around. That’s what this show is. It’s comfortable. It’s the definition of a Netflix show that, if the “automatic next episode” button wasn’t invented, you never would’ve continued watching it. But, since it does, you’re like, “Why not?” And hey, to its credit, it’s a lot more exciting than Andor. So, there’s that. :)
