Last week we talked about how to set up a scene in order to create the best dialogue. Today we’re going to go back even further than that and talk about how to create characters that lead to good dialogue. How important is character creation when it comes to dialogue? Well, you know that guy Quentin Tarantino? The screenwriter who many believe writes the best dialogue in town? All Tarantino does is he creates a series of larger-than-life characters and simply lets them talk. You could argue that unless you’re constructing some of your characters with the larger-than-life gene, you’re dooming your screenplay to bad dialogue. Think about it, how many average characters do you remember in all of the movies you’ve seen who spit out memorable dialogue? I’m guessing none.

So my first piece of advice to you when it comes to character and dialogue is to create a character who’s larger than life in some way. Now when I say, “larger than life,” I don’t mean Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids. I mean there’s something about your character’s personality that’s bigger than the average person. Juno is a good example. That character was talkative and opinionated, slightly larger than life. But she was still able to exist in reality. Steve Jobs in Aaron Sorkin’s “Jobs,” is another example. Big and opinionated and intelligent and thoughtful. He had that larger than life quality.

So the next question becomes, how do we vary these characters? Not everyone should be Juno. The good news is, it’s not as hard as you think. Personality comes in many different flavors. There’s the motormouth, the joker, the know-it-all, the b.s.’er, the opinionated, the walking thesaurus. Write out a list of all the people you know in your life and next to them write down what their most dominant trait is and you’ll get a sense of what types of people are fun to listen to and what types aren’t. You can also watch sit coms (Seinfeld is a good one) where characters, especially guest characters, are highlighted by a particular trait (the soup nazi is militant, for example), and get ideas that way. It’s important to note that every trait is scaleable to the tone of the movie you’re writing. There’s a version of the Soup Nazi for a move like “The Mule.” You’d just have to dial the goofiness back and make him one of the drug dealers, not a soup dealer.

One of the things that really gets in the way of good dialogue is, believe it or not, the main character. This is because your main character is often the most grounded variable in your story. Their goals and desires need a certain element of truth to them for us to care about their journey. Unfortunately, this often makes them an un-engaging conversationalist. And normal conversation isn’t as fun to read as larger-than-life conversation. This is why people remember Han Solo over Luke Skywalker, Jack Sparrow over Will Turner.

There are a couple of ways to deal with this. The first is to buck the trend of writing a grounded main character and center your story around someone larger than life. A good example of this is The Narrator (Edward Norton) in Fight Club. The guy is very thoughtful and has lots of opinions on work, love, and life, and he’s giving us a rundown of these thoughts throughout the story. He’s anything but your average grounded main character. Christy Hall’s angry man-hating heroine, Skylar, in her spec, “Get Home Safe,” is another anti-grounded character who says what’s on her mind and doesn’t care how you feel about it.

The second way to tackle this problem is to identify which character in your script shares the most screentime with your grounded lead and make sure they’re a larger-than-life character. A recent example of this is Hell or High Water. In that film, Toby Howard (Chris Pine) is our muted reserved down-to-earth lead and Tanner Howard (Ben Foster), his brother, is our alcoholic rambling joking threatening larger-than-life character. What this does is it creates contrast between the characters. Contrast results in a steady wave of conflict. And conflict is where you’re going to find all of your best dialogue. And the reason, of course, that you do this with the second biggest character is because you’ll have a ton of scenes with those characters throughout the screenplay, which guarantees you a lot of good dialogue exchanges.

One of the most dangerous things you can do in a script is create two down-to-earth grounded leads who aren’t big talkers. I’m sure a few cinephiles here can name a movie or two where that’s worked. But I’m guessing those examples are few and far between.

How many larger-than-life characters should you include in your script? That’s obviously going to depend on genre and what kind of script you’re writing. Every character will have a function in the screenplay that may or may not jive with being “larger than life.” However, one of the nice things about supporting characters is that their lives don’t have to be as fully-shaped and grounded as your leads. Therefore, you can have more fun with them. A movie with great dialogue is Good Will Hunting and pretty much every supporting character in that movie is larger than life. Chuckie (Ben Affleck) was a big goofball. Morgan (Casey Affleck) was the willing butt of the joke. Skylar was big and humorous and always ready to have fun. Lambeau (the math professor) was this fevered tortured soul desperate to see this young man reach his potential. And of course Sean the Therapist was the most animated character of them all. If there ever was a movie to prove the point of this article – that larger-than-life characters are the key to good dialogue – Good Will Hunting would be it. To summarize, there’s no limit to how many of these characters you can add. But there are situations where you have to be very judicious about adding multiple larger-than-life characters. I probably wouldn’t have a ton of them in Moonlight, for example.

I want to finish this off by saying that one of the consistent threads in the scripts I read that contain lifeless dialogue is the lack of interesting characters. It’s hard to make someone sound unique who isn’t. This is the reason for another big dialogue faux-pas, which is try-hard dialogue – characters saying big outlandish things that they would never say. This happens when writers construct uninteresting characters and then try to shove interesting words into their mouths. It doesn’t work because it never feels like the real character. It feels like the writer.

In the coming weeks, we’re going to learn how to apply these tools to actually write good dialogue. Should be fun!

Hey, do you have a logline that isn’t working? Are people not responding to it? Try out my logline service. It’s 25 bucks for a 1-10 rating, 150 word analysis, and a logline rewrite. I also have a deluxe service for 40 dollars that allows for unlimited e-mails back and forth where we tweak the logline until you’re satisfied. I consult on everything screenwriting related (first page, first ten pages, first act, outlines, and of course, full scripts). So if you’re interested in getting some quality feedback, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I’ll send you a quote!

Genre: Sci-Fi/Drama/TV
Premise: The kids from Hawkins, Indiana are back, this time with a mysterious Russian signal to decode and a possessed Billy to fend off.
About: Stranger Things is beloved. How beloved? A seasons 1&2 recap with the show’s stars released two weeks ago garnered 4 and a half million views on Youtube! Just for going over old stuff! Word on the street is that the series is generating more conversation than that Marvel flick we reviewed yesterday. Does this mean Stranger Things seasons 4, 5, and 6 are inevitable? Are we going to follow the lives of Dustin, Mike, and Eleven into their 30s? The way studios are pulling their properties away from Netflix these days, don’t bet against it!
Created by: The Duffer Brothers
Details: This is a review of the first three episodes of Season 3

Yesterday, a commenter brought up the idea that I’d become one of these bitter movie reviewer types who hate everything. I mean, who couldn’t like Spider-Man: Far From Home?? The ONLY thing it wants to do is give the audience a good time!

If I’m being completely honest, the commenter has a point. I think this is something everyone in the business worries about. At what point does it only become about technique, as opposed to how a movie makes you feel? Recently, Gwyneth Paltrow was raked over the coals for not knowing her character, Pepper Potts, was in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Had Gwyneth too, become so blind to the magic of film that she no longer paid attention to her contribution to the community?

Once you’ve figured out whether I just compared myself to Gwyneth Paltrow or not, we can go deeper into that question. I think everyone in movies – especially critics – worry that because they watch so much stuff, they’ll eventually become desensitized to the medium. A french fry is the most amazing invention in the world until you learn that it started out as a big ugly brown thing covered in cow manure.

So to answer that commenter, yes, I do think bitterness shines through at times when I review something. And no, I don’t like when it happens. I don’t want to be the “everything sucks” guy. There are plenty of those people on the internet already. But it’s also hard to endorse something when you’re not feeling it. Spider-Man may have wanted to be the most fun movie in the world. But that doesn’t mean it was. Marvel got to where it got because it took chances. Far From Home was the anti-chance. Like the taco truck selling 99 cent tacos outside the bar at 2am. No matter how uplifting I want to be, I can’t endorse that. At least not sober.

So where does this leave us today? Ironically, Stranger Things isn’t that different from Spider-Man. It’s about high school kids. It’s about having a good time. It’s a big event series. You could argue that these properties are fighting for the same demographic. So who wins in a Spider-Man 2 versus Stranger Things 3 showdown? Let’s find out.

It’s summertime in Hawkins, Indiana and a new mall has opened up, giving our Stranger Things crew of Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Will, and Mad Max something to do besides ride their BMX’s around town. At the mall, Studly Steve now works at an ice cream shop with a girl named Robin who looks eerily like a cross between Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman because, oh yeah, she is a cross between them!

Meanwhile, Mike and Eleven are doing a lot of kissing, as Eleven tries harder than ever to be a normal kid. This is going to be difficult because after Dustin builds a giant antennae to try and communicate with his long distance girlfriend he met at science camp, he overhears a foreboding Russian transmission, which he writes down and later tries to decode.

But things really take a turn for the tubular when Billy, now a life guard, tries to hook up with a MILF, but crashes his car on the way to her house and gets pulled into the upside-down. There, Billy meets… another Billy, and when Billy is sent back to the rightside-up, we realize he’s the alternate possessed Billy. If that’s confusing, you’ll be happy to know that Winona Ryder is now obsessed with the magnets on her fridge, which don’t work anymore. These kids might be growing up but it’s nice to know some things in Hawkins never change.

Here’s the thing about Stranger Things. It’s not a very well-written show. There are too many characters and storylines to keep up with and a good portion of them feel like filler. I mean, do we really need an entire subplot built around Jim Hopper working up the courage to tell a 14 year old boy to cool it on the kissing with his adopted daughter? There’s a scene with Hopper getting drunk and watching Magnum P.I. as he becomes further and further irritated by the idea of kissing that may be the most wasteful two minutes in TV this year.

But the magic of Stranger Things is not that it’s the best written show on television. It’s that it’s the most watchable show on television. I can’t just throw on an episode of Jessica Jones. Or Narcos, or Mindhunters, or even Orange is the New Black. But I can throw on an episode of Stranger Things and, for a little under an hour, every problem in the world fades away. This show takes you back to a simpler time, it surrounds you with incredibly likable people, and it throws just enough zany yet entertaining plot points at you to keep you wanting more.

There are a lot of things we can talk about in regards to this season. But I want to highlight one in particular. The Not-Who-They-Seem Character. The Not-Who-They-Seem Character is any character who, for story reasons, isn’t the person everyone else thinks they are. In this case, that’s Billy. They think he’s Billy. But he’s actually Upside-Down Billy. You see this character everywhere. We just saw it with Spider-Man. Nick Fury is actually Mysterio for a scene. We see it in Mission Impossible. Whoever wears the masks becomes someone else. You see it in more down-to-earth narratives, like Alias. Jennifer Garner is just a regular girl to her friends. But in reality, she’s an international spy.

These characters do double-duty because one, actors love to play them, and two, the very nature of their duality provides numerous avenues for drama. For starters, every conversation they’re in has dramatic irony because they’re lying. They’re not providing the other person with the truth of who they are. And that makes any interaction interesting. These characters become even more valuable in a TV show because you don’t have the spectacle that you do in movies. Your budget-per-minute is a lot lower. So you need to look for clever ways to keep things interesting and utilizing a “Not-Who-They-Seem” character is one of the most cost-effective ways to do that.

Another thing you have to constantly be on top of in TV writing is love stories. But not love stories that are going well. Those never work. Love stories that either have the potential to happen or love stories that are happening, but have too many roadblocks to survive. In this season of Stranger Things, we have the potential romance of Steve and Robin, the potential romance of Jim and Joyce, the potential romance of Billy and the Mom. And in the one romance that’s supposedly going well – Mike and Eleven – we have Jim coming in and telling Mike to stay away from her, effectively ending their relationship. Call this what you want – but relationship management needs to be a strength of yours if you’re going to write in television.

I still struggle with Stranger Things at times. I don’t know if the Duffer Brothers just use 80s homages because they like them or because they don’t have any original ideas of their own. But like I said, this show is so watchable that whatever beef you have with it fades away the further you get into each episode. It and Black Mirror are currently the only must-watch shows on the streaming giant. I hope I still feel this way after finishing the season! What about you guys? What did you think?

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Our interest in each storyline will depend on the stakes of said storyline. A big reason the “Jim Hates Kissing” storyline doesn’t work is because the stakes are so low. Who cares if they kiss? I have a feeling that early drafts of this may have had them working up towards having sex but that someone stepped in and said that’s too much for these characters. If that were the case, Jim’s anxiety about the relationship would’ve been justified. But innocent kissing? There’s zero stakes attached to that.

Genre: Action/Drama
Premise: When a terrorist group takes hundreds of hostages captive in the Empire State Building, a fearless CIA agent sneaks into the famous landmark and climbs 66 stories to take down the bad guys.
About: Today we get a script from S. Craig Zahler, who STILL holds the #3 spot on my Top 25 List (look over to the right side to see the Top 25). Zahler’s recent foray into directing has finally gotten him enough clout to get Brigands of Rattleborge made. Park Chan-wook, the director of one of the best movies ever, “Oldboy,” will steer the Western. Matthew McConaghey is almost a go to star. A little known fact about Zahler. He’s a metal head and scores his own films!
Writer: S. Craig Zahler
Details: 121 pages

Zahler is at an interesting point in his career. For an entire decade, he was one of the most successful unproduced screenwriters in the business. Maybe even THE most successful. He sold a ton of scripts. But his heavy-handed novelistic voice was both an ally and an adversary. It helped him stand out from the pack. But people weren’t sure his scripts would translate to the big screen.

At some point, Zahler had enough. If you’re not going to make my movies, he said, I’ll make my movies. And he made Bone Tomahawk. Then Brawl in Cell Block 99. And most recently, Dragged Across Concrete. Perhaps his ten years in waiting was a predication of what was to come after all. His movies have been received fairly well from critics. Hard core cinephiles also enjoy them. But the jury’s still out on if there’s a mainstream audience. This is one of his most commercial scripts. So maybe it changes the conversation.

Rhett Westermark feels guilty every day for not being there when his older brother died. The two were firefighters when 9/11 went down. While he eagerly waited to be called in, he heard over the radio that the building his brother was in collapsed. Twelve years later, Rhett, now a CIA agent, finds it tough to open up to anyone. He’s so detached from his relationship with his girlfriend, Danielle, in fact, he tells her she can go out with other men while they’re together.

New York City is already on heightened alert when terrorists take over the Empire State Building. The president is in town, deflecting heavy criticism for America’s participation in the Breznian war. The terrorists secure floors 66 and 67, huddling up 500 hostages, then announcing their demands. The government is to deliver them the president of the United States by 5pm or they will start throwing one hostage out of the building every half hour.

The city calls their bluff and, sure enough, they toss someone out with a noose around their neck. When the rope goes taut, the hostage’s head snaps off. These guys are nothing if not dramatic. The city then sends in a SWAT team. But the terrorists easily take care of them. They subsequently announce a punishment for the SWAT team. Now TWO people will be thrown off the building every half hour.

Westermark tells his coworkers that there’s no conventional way to handle this situation. He has an idea. He’ll go in, all by himself, then use an elevator shaft to pull a bin full of weapons to the 66th floor. He’ll then arm the hostages and make it a fair fight. Before they can agree with Westermark, he’s off. He’s not going to wait around for people to die this time.

But people do die. As Westermark painstakingly moves up the Empire State Building one floor at a time, he keeps encountering terrorists. And when these terrorists report up to their boss, more hostages are tossed off the building. But Westermark eventually gets to the hostage floor and meticulously arms the hostages one by one through bathroom breaks. Finally the signal comes in and it’s an all out war between captives and captors!

One of best ways to find a big idea, something that’s going to attract producers, is to take a famous movie and find a fresh way into the idea. Here, Zahler has basically created a fresh take on Die Hard – which is: what if we did the serious/realistic version of Die Hard?

The problem with looking for fresh takes on popular ideas is that there’s still no guarantee that the idea will be interesting to people. In other words, just because you have a new take doesn’t mean it’s going to be a good take. Is a serious version of Die Hard something people want to see? I don’t know, to be honest. I’m lukewarm on the concept. But that doesn’t mean others won’t be into it.

The strange thing about “Breaking” is that it spends a lot of time setting up its characters and yet I didn’t feel like I knew any of them. Westermark, in particular, was relegated to “guy who lost his brother in 9/11.” There wasn’t anything deeper than that. And since the 9/11 survivor thing is used so often in storytelling, you need to bring more context to it in order to overcome the cliche.

A big issue was that Westermark never spoke. The only time he said anything was to take care of logistics (“I’m going to go here and then you can meet me there.”). His character was very introspective and the problem with introspective characters is that they emit very little personality on the page. So it’s hard for the reader to connect with them. And this could pretty much be said for all the characters.

The one character I felt like I knew the best was Danielle, the girlfriend. Which was ironic because she had nothing to do with the main plot. She just leaves lots of voice mails for Westermark opining about the state of their relationship. This goes to show that how much a character speaks has a big influence on how well the reader feels like they know them. I shouldn’t feel after this script that I know Danielle better than the main character, but I did.

Another issue with the script is that there’s a ton of jumping around in the first act. We meet Westermark, the girlfriend, the bad guy, the agents, some people in China, several other bad guys, hot dog vendors, a few more people who I didn’t even know what they had to do with the story. When you jump around that much early on, it becomes very easy for the reader to lose focus. Since we’re not sitting down and getting to know any one character, we don’t feel like we know any of the characters. I had to keep reeling myself back in to focus.

You can still create memorable characters within this format. But you have to give them a really strong introduction. Westermark’s introduction is waiting to hear if he’s going to the World Trade Center and then realizing his brother is dead. Again, dying in 9/11 is not an original backstory. Is hasn’t been for 18 years. So unless you can find a way into that scenario that’s unique and memorable, it’s probably not going to leave much of an impact. When you couple that with a dozen quick ambiguous character introductions, you’re making it really hard on the reader.

The thing is, I like the central plot here. Painstakingly moving up a skyscraper one floor at a time to kill terrorists. That’s good. And the hero’s plan is a unique one. He’s going to arm the hostages once he gets there. Also good. But this is a great example of how important the first act is. If we’re not intimately connected to your main characters after the first act, then even when they’re involved in a cool plot like this one, we’re not going to be emotionally invested.

And all of this is rather baffling because it’s not like Zahler isn’t putting attention on the characters. You get the feeling he thinks about them a lot. But the combination of an introverted non-emoting hero and a scattershot never-ending introduction pattern prevent us from knowing them as well as he does. That’s a mistake we writers make all the time. We assume that the character is just as clear in the reader’s eyes as he is in our own heads. But a reader only knows a character from what they say and what they do. So if the writer doesn’t pick the right scenes to highlight those qualities, we’re (the reader) seeing a different character than you (the writer).

Not a bad script at all. But the lack of a hero to connect with left me wanting more.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: 9/11 is a tricky topic. It hasn’t led to a single strong movie or TV show (a couple of minor successes, but let’s be honest, nothing great). I think it has something to do with the inherent melodrama that comes with the territory. It’s almost too sad to write about. And whenever people try and incorporate it, it feels try-hard, maudlin, cliche. I would stay away from it unless you have the greatest can’t miss 9/11 idea ever. But if you’re like, “I have this great idea about a brother and sister trying to pick up the pieces after their dad dies in 9-11”… uh, yeah, don’t write that.

Genre: Spy Action Thriller
Premise: (from Hit List) A former assassin, turned reformed housewife and mother, faces off against the revenge-driven millennial sociopath she accidentally left alive after she wiped out the rest of her family.
About: This script got 24 votes on last year’s Hit List, which put it in the top 35. Erica Schreiber was repped at WME (before the strike) and got her start working as an assistant in the writer’s room for Monk. Most recently she got a stab at the upcoming Micronauts movie.
Writer: Erica Schreiber
Details: 117 pages

Uma for Mia?

We’re sticking with the Russian theme this week! Which makes absolutely no sense, since July 4th is Independence Day in the U.S. Maybe tomorrow I’ll review a Murican script to balance it out.

Today we’re getting another radiation dose of the Jane Wick trend. But this one is a little different. Having finished the script an hour ago, I’m having trouble categorizing it. That should be a good thing. You don’t want your John/Jane Wick spec to feel like everyone else’s. But you don’t want it to be too out there either. We need a sense of what kind of movie we’re watching.

Mia is a CIA spy in the heart of Russia. Her and her partner, Dale, shake down a Russian spy for some weapons info. Mia not only shoots the man and his wife dead afterwards, but their 10 year old son as well. The two then use the info Mia retrieved to infiltrate a Russian bio-weapons lab. Afterwards, Mia runs off with another spy, Guy, to ditch the spy life and start a family in the suburbs.

Cut to 13 years later and the now 40-something Mia is living a boring life as a real estate agent with Guy and their 12 year old daughter, Case. But mere pages after we’ve established Mia’s new reality, both her workplace and every car on the block blow up. Out of nowhere comes a psycho chick named Serena who we’ll later find out was hiding in the house that day Mia killed her family. Mia tries to get to her family but watches in horror as Guy and Case are blown up in their car. Serena informs Mia that she’s not going to kill her yet, then disappears.

We then jump back in time to meet Serena as a little child. We watch her befriend a Russian gangster, learn how to kill, search for the woman who killed her family, move to the U.S. as a 17 year old via a Russian online wedding service, lose her virginity to her new husband, start killing all her new husband’s friends who she doesn’t like, and eventually locate Mia.


Meanwhile, while that ongoing flashback is happening, we’re watching Mia put the pieces together, reconnect with her old partner Dale, and try to find out what the heck is going on. Remember, she had no idea there even was a girl in the house that day. Eventually the two find out Serena wants to take her on at a mall for some reason. So Mia shows up there and we have a big mall battle, complete with a collapsing escalator that chews up pairs of mall shoppers.

After that showdown, when things are at their lowest, Mia learns that Case is still alive! Serena is holding her. Mia gets in touch with one last ally to come up with a plan to charge into the lion’s den and take this psycho girl down for good.

One thing I give 13 Years Later credit for is keeping me on my toes. Every time I thought I had a handle on this movie, Schreiber would throw a curve ball at me. It’s rare that you set up a character as extensively as Guy, the husband, was, then kill him off in a blink-and-you-miss-it car explosion. Case too. Although she later comes back into the story via a twist.

I also liked the initial setup – or what I thought the movie was going to be – which was two top-level killers laying waste to a suburb in an effort to be the last woman standing. The script’s best moments are when we’re focused on that. Like the mall showdown. But that’s not what the script ends up being. Just when we’ve set up our adversaries, we flash back to get to know everybody better and learn how they got here.

I’m not going to get into some big rant about flashbacks. We’ve covered that to death here. And to Schreiber’s credit, helping us understand Serena better does give the spy vs. spy set pieces more emotional weight. But to me, the juice (the flashbacks) wasn’t worth the squeeze. The story is the present, not the past. And when it comes to movies, that’s where you want to be 99% of the time. Novels are good for learning about character backstories. But movies shine brightest when they’re in the now. Especially with an action movie like this.

Another issue I had with the script was the tone. 13 Years Later wants to be this John Wick like piece of popcorn entertainment. That’s clear from lines like this one from Serena: “I remember thinking you were a monster. Watching you murder my family from a fucking closet. But now you’re just another suburban mommy in her 40s who only kills bottles of Chardonnay.” But then it also has a hero who kills a 10 year old boy in the opening scene and then later shoots a cop in her face. Or a 17 year old who sneaks into the U.S. as a mail order bride and has sex with her much older new husband. I can’t marry those two extremes in the same movie. You gotta pick one or the other.

Personally, I would embrace the absurdity of this premise and just have fun with it. This is an 80s Schwarzenegger flick in disguise. I mean a showdown at the mall where people are falling into collapsed escalators? Why would you want to add extremely mature themes to that? This is a fun situation. An entire suburb as a chess piece with two characters using every gun and explosive in their arsenal to take each other down.

This was a good case where you could anticipate the problems in the logline itself. When you see the words, “faces off against the revenge-driven millennial sociopath,” you’re imagining a comedy. That word, “millennial,” isn’t typically used in a serious manner. So every time someone makes a joke here, you’re thinking, “Okay, I understand this movie.” But then your hero blows off the head of an innocent old man at a bar and you’re like, “Whoa. I don’t understand this at all.”

Tone is one of those things that’s hard to get a handle on. But basically, the larger the gap between your most humorous moment and your most serious moment, the more tonal issue you’re going to have. Put simply, the plot here isn’t serious enough to support a character this dark.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Think real hard about who your character kills. If you’re going to have them kill an innocent person, the reader will struggle to like them. And if they willingly kill an innocent child? I can guarantee you they won’t like them. Truth be told, I don’t think it’s possible to come back from a hero willingly killing a child. If there’s a single example of the opposite being the case, I don’t remember it. But if anyone comes up with one in the comments, maybe we can figure out why it worked.

Genre: Drama
Premise: The fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown, whose damage was compounded by a corrupt government determined to cover up the severity of the incident.
About: Chernobyl snuck up out of nowhere to become a huge HBO hit. It has an unheard of 9.6/10 rating on IMDB. The show has stirred up controversy in Russia, where the Communist Party of Russia’s Sergey Malinkovich called the show disgusting and is trying to ban it across the country.
Creator: Craig Maizen
Details: This is a review of the first two episodes

I was sitting down this weekend, trying to figure out what I was going to review on Monday – the light as a buttery crepe “Yesterday,” or the heavy as a dead whale carcass, “Chernobyl.” The choice would’ve been easy had the two been evenly rated. I wanted to watch something fun. But Chernobyl’s review scores so outweighed Yesterday’s that I had no choice.

I bring this up because it’s something writers should be thinking about whenever they start a new project. They should imagine a consumer trying to make a choice. What is it about your movie or TV show that would make someone choose it over something else? It’s a bit of a mind f&*% because you can’t really get into the collective heads of everybody on the planet. But entertainment is one of the most competitive industries in the world. So if you aren’t at least considering the competition, you’ll come up short.

“Chernobyl” doesn’t waste any time getting down to brass tacks. After a brief flash-forward to show one of the chief inspectors hanging himself, we cut back to that fateful night where we see the Chernobyl reactor blow up. The chief engineer on site, Anatoly Dyatlov, dismisses the explosion, arguing that it’s a minor fire as opposed to a meltdown of the reactor core, which would be way more devastating. How devastating? Valery Legasov, the chief of the commission, later tells us that every hour that goes by where the core is exposed, it will be like 2 Hiroshima bombs going off. And unless they stop it, that could go on for 1000 years.

Back to Dyatlov, who informs his superiors that the radiation readings are only coming in at 3.6 R/s, which is bad but by no means lethal. He fails to mention, however, that their on-site dosimeters only measure up to 3.6 R/s. In other words, the meters are tapping out at the highest level they’re capable of showing. Meanwhile, Legasov, a professor who’s an expert in these matters, is flown to Chernobyl to assess the damage. He realizes immediately that this is no small fire. The reactor core has exploded. Which means Chernobyl isn’t spitting out a pithy 3.6 R/s, but rather 2000 R/s. In a meeting with Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev, he tells him that if he doesn’t plug up that reactor core, not only will tens of millions of people in Russia die, but millions of people in the surrounding countries will die as well.

Gorbachev teams Legasov up with Boris Shcherbina, a high ranking Russian general who seems more annoyed by this mess than worried. When they visit the heart of the site and see the devastating effects the radiation is having on the workers and residents, Boris changes his tune. The two will have to figure out a way to plug up the reactor core, an action that has no precedent in history. But it only gets worse. Legasov learns that the reactors’ tanks are all filled with water, which means a chemical reaction is inevitable. When that happens, there will be a gigantic nuclear explosion the likes of which has never been seen before.

One of the primary reasons Chernobyl is so good is that it builds its premise around dramatic irony. We, the audience, know a lot more than the characters onscreen. We know the radiation that’s been released is so devastating that this town is abandoned still to this day. So when the nuclear reactor workers are shrugging their shoulders saying this isn’t a big deal, we’re screaming at the screen, “YES! IT’S A HUGE DEAL! YOU NEED TO ACT NOW YOU DUMMIES!” That’s one of the great things about working through a dramatically ironic premise. The audience becomes actively involved because they want the characters to catch up to them.

This is the same reason Titanic worked so well. After the ship hits the iceberg, we’re gobsmacked that everyone is so calm. We’re screaming at them, “YOU NEED TO GET OFF THE BOAT! THIS THING’S GOING TO START SINKING AND YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!”

Once the characters in Chernobyl begin to accept the gravity of the situation, traditional GSU sets in. Goal – Fill the reactor core. Stakes – Tens of millions of lives. Urgency – Not only could the core blow at any minute, but every second the core is exposed, Hiroshima levels of radiation are slipping into the atmosphere.

Actually, if I had to identify the single biggest factor for the show’s success, it would be the urgency. That’s because it isn’t your typical, “if we don’t find the bad guys, a bomb will blow up in three hours,” but rather EVERY SECOND they don’t do their job, more and more people are going to die. The “bomb,” in this instance, is ongoing. It’s blowing up every second. This provides the entire show with an unheard of level of urgency.

A geeky screenwriting thing Maizen does well is analogies. When you’re dealing with something complicated like a nuclear reactor explosion, you need the characters to convey to the audience what’s going on in a way that they understand it. Early on, Legasov gives Boris a rundown of what’s happening. He explains that radiation is composed of these tiny microscopic bullets. These bullets shoot out into everything, including humans, but we can’t see the damage as clearly because they’re so small. The higher the radiation, the more bullets there are. And he essentially says that the level of radiation being emitted from Chernobyl at the moment is the equivalent of a trillion times trillion bullets, all shooting at us at once.

That was the perfect analogy because now, even normal scenes where people are right outside the destroyed building, are tense. Because I’m thinking to myself, “They’re getting shot over and over and over again right now. Get away from this place!” That’s a huge part of what made this work so well. You’re constantly thinking, “Get this over with and get away from this place so you have a chance at a normal life.”

The human element in Chernobyl is almost as compelling as the white hot plot. The show continually puts its characters in the predicament of either telling the truth or towing the company line. Do you admit that the core has exploded or do you cover your a%&? Do you follow your superior’s orders even if it means thousands of people dying, or do you tell everyone to get off the island as quickly as possible? Even our most honest character, Legasov, finds himself assuring some Chernobyl residents that they’ll be okay because that’s what he’s been ordered to do.

The show only has one misstep so far, which is the subplot between Vasily, a firefighter, and his wife, Lyudmilla. Vasily is one of the first people called to the scene to put the fire out, but quickly becomes sick due to radiation, and must be transferred to Moscow. Lyudmilla goes from official to official, building to building, trying to find her husband, and eventually travels to Moscow to reunite with him.

The idea behind this subplot is sound. You want to humanize these events. You can’t just focus on the big plot points. We have to see how it affects the individuals, the “regular people,” who were ignorantly caught in the mess. The problem is that once Vasily is sent away and Lyudmilla follows him, they’re a million miles away from the story. The story is Chernoybl. Watching a couple of people nowhere near Chernobyl isn’t that compelling.

Contrast this with another subplot, Ulana Khomyuk’s storyline. Ulana is a nuclear physicist who lives far away from Chernobyl but senses something is off when she can’t get in touch with the facility. She then travels TO Chernobyl to tell them what she knows, and ends up helping the other scientists fill in the reactor core. The difference with this subplot is our character gets CLOSER TO THE ACTION, whereas with Vasily an Lyudmilla, they get further and further away. I call this the “Island Effect” and I’ll talk about it more in a second.

I have to give it to Maizen. He really stepped up here. On top of everything he did within the story itself, he also made the wise decision to go with a contained miniseries format. If this would’ve been a traditional TV series, he would’ve had to sacrifice the urgency in some way so that the story could last. But since the urgency is everything here, it had to be a mini-series in order to work. Very well done. Can’t wait to watch the rest of the show.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the watch
[x] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: “The Island Effect” is when you take a subplot and move it far enough away from the center of your story (to its own “island”) that the audience doesn’t care about it. Vasily and Lyudmilla were too far away from the exciting stuff for us to care about them. I see this mostly with writers who overestimate side characters in their script, giving them major subplots that are independent enough of the main storyline that we don’t care. One of the most popular recent iterations of the The Island Effect would be the Canto Bight stuff in The Last Jedi.