Hey, Jordan didn’t make the cut of his high school team either.  So if you’re on this list, it may be a good thing!

This is a reminder that on the second to last Friday of every month, we’ll have a logline showdown here on the site. Send your title, genre, and logline to me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com. I’ll vet the best five, put them up on the site for competition. Winner gets a review the following Friday (so your script has to be written!). The next deadline is Thursday, February 16th, 10pm Pacific Time.

Unfortunately, not every logline can be a winner. So in the spirit of both teaching and making sure that everyone doesn’t keep sending me loglines that have no chance, I’m featuring 7 loglines that will not make the Amateur Showdown cut. If you entered with one of these, learn from your mistakes, and enter another showdown with a fresh concept. We’re doing these all year long so you have time!

Title: HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
Genre: Thriller
Logline: Disturbed by the disappearance of a pretty blond white girl overshadowing that of her black best friend, an 11-year-old white girl fakes her own disappearance in hopes of it leading authorities to her friend.

Analysis: I sort of understand what’s going on here but it’s one of those ideas that’s not quite formulated when you lay it out. And this is a challenge that a lot of writers run up against. These ideas that *kind of* sound like movie ideas. But if you actually break down the logline, they don’t make sense. In this case, we’re exploring the well-documented phenomena that the news only reports on pretty young white girls that go missing, never black girls. So our hero fakes her disappearance… to make people look for her black friend. Wait, hold on, what?? How does her going missing get people to look for her friend? Aren’t they only going to look for her? And doesn’t that only solidify the ‘missing young white girl’ phenomena? Maybe she leaves messages for the cops like, “Don’t forget my friend who’s also missing!” I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense to me. And a logline MUST MAKE SENSE. Let me say that again. A logline MUST MAKE SENSE. You don’t get to explain your logline to someone. They just read the logline. So IT MUST MAKE SENSE.

Title: Office Murder Mystery
Genre: Mystery
Logline: Waking up in a locked office next to the dead body of his boss, a man suffering from a schizophrenic disorder must find the real murderer by the end of the business day with the help of his five favorite dead mystery writers that only he can see, hear or speak to.

Analysis: This one comes from a longtime reader of the site, Alex, who I really like. But this logline doesn’t work for me. It definitely has a high-concept feel to it. But two things are keeping me away. One, whenever you start talking about schizophrenics, the writing level needs to be 10 times that of a normal writer. It’s a very specific disease and in order for it to come off as authentic, the writer really has to understand it, and in my experience, 999 writers out of 1000 don’t. So it always ends up being lame. Also, the “dead mystery writers” thing comes out of nowhere. One second we have a dead body of a boss and the next we have mystery writers??? Where did these mystery writers come from exactly? I know. They’re in his head. But they’re not set up well. We weren’t told that our hero was a vociferous reader or an aspiring novelist. Just a “man.”  So there’s zero connection to the mystery writers component.  For these reasons, the logline doesn’t work.

Title: Eagle Heart
Genre: Period drama – WWII
Logline: When his father comes home from war without legs and without hope, a nine year old boy believes that by saving a dying bird he can stop his family from falling apart.

Analysis: These are always hard for me to turn down because I can tell the writer has written a very heartfelt story that he cares deeply about. But the logline still has to work. A big problem I’ll see in a lot of loglines is that the writer makes a HUGE leap from one dot to the next. A ton of necessary information in between is skipped over, making the logline seem awkward and disconnected. We start out with a dad coming home from war, injured and hopeless. Okay, so far so good. Then we’re saving a bird. Wait, what??? What about saving dad?? Then we find out he’s saving the bird so that his family doesn’t fall apart. What about saving the bird to save his dad!!?? All three sections of the logline do not operate in harmony, which is why I passed this one over.

Title: SINNERMAN
Genre: Horror
Logline: When a home invasion ends in murder a mother of two young children is ‘haunted’ by the intruder’s malevolent spirit but she soon discovers that she’s the undead and is being held in purgatory…

Analysis: First of all, when a writer hits me up with 4 or 5 submissions, I pretty much don’t trust those entries. As writers, we typically have 1 or 2 screenplays that are RIGHT NOW our best work. We do not have five equally good scripts. Three of those are older work and not nearly representative of what we’re capable of now. So if you’re just spamming people with your five most recent screenplays, chances are you’re not really trying to show someone your best work. Hence, I wouldn’t use this strategy (on my site or anywhere else). As for the logline, it has a bunch of those buzzwords that make it sound like a movie (home invasion, haunted, undead, purgatory) but nothing unique to help it stand out from the pack. A script idea usually needs a unique attractor of some sort. This one doesn’t have one.

Title: WEIRD WAR
Genre: Epic Vietnam War Era Supernatural thriller
Logline: A young grunt in denial about his psychic ability is assigned to an elite squad of spirit hunters and is forced to come to terms with his family’s own supernatural past.

Analysis: If you follow my site, you know that extended genre descriptions take you out of the running immediately. You want one genre descriptor, two at most. In very rare situations, three. But whatever you do, you don’t want to add things into the genre description (Epic, Vietnam Ear Era) that aren’t accepted known genres. Not only does it come off as unprofessional, but it indicates that the script is all over the place. So, what do we see with this logline? Well, it sounds all over the place. Psychic abilities. Spirit hunters. It sounds out there and, based on my extensive experience reading scripts, like it’s going to have a very wonky and muddled mythology. Now, could I be wrong? Of course. But this is what my experience tells me is coming, which is why the script didn’t make the showdown.

Title: Edge of Humanity
Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: Earth faces the final stages of environmental collapse from climate change. The global government secretly commits genocide to avert human extinction, while rival factions fight to uncover the truth.

Analysis: First of all, this writer sent a nice e-mail saying that he recently received his first “RECOMMEND.” So good on him! But, when it comes to Logline Showdown, the recommends are rarer than snow in Los Angeles. We’re tough graders here, and the problem with Edge of Humanity is that the logline is way too broad. There isn’t a single mention of a character. So who do we connect to? And what’s the actual story, since presumably we’re going to be following someone on a journey? On top of that, the broad strokes are too generalized and don’t set the script apart. More generic buzzwords: “environmental collapse,” “climate change,” “global government,” “genocide,” “human extinction.” It just sounds like a million other scripts, movies, and tv shows. This is your monthly reminder that a logline should not be about what makes your movie SIMILAR to others. It should be about what makes your movie DIFFERENT from others.

Title: Controller
Genre:  Sci-Fi
Logline:  A young fugitive, still traumatized from a high school assault, uses an experimental mind-control device to save a new lover from a jealous techno thief.

Analysis: This logline has several problems. For starters, the high school assault should not be in the logline. That’s backstory. It doesn’t add anything relevant that we *need* to know to understand the story. From there, you have “experimental mind-control” and “techno thief.” These are two major aspects of the logline and they don’t go together at all. The featured words in a logline MUST CONNECT for your logline to feel whole. So, for example, if you say your hero is a vegan, then it works well if, later in the logline, they find themselves in a slaughterhouse. Finally, I don’t really know what a techno thief is. You mean like they steal bitcoin? It feels like a dated word and it’s not clear enough all on its own. If any word in your logline has a chance of being even mildly misunderstood, you don’t want to use it.

Carson gives logline consultations for $25 a pop.  E-mail him at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if interested. 

Genre: Action-Thriller
Premise: After an ex-Marine turned lawyer sees that he’s been reported dead in a local car accident, he gradually learns that he’s the target of someone involved in a top secret government program.
About: Million dollar sale back in 1993 to Arnold Kopelson, the producer of The Fugitive. Christine Roum, the writer, still writes today, 30 years later. She’s currently writing on the show, Big Sky.
Writer: Christine Roum
Details: 121 pages

Would he still do it? The Seagalaissance?

This one has a fun backstory.

It was sold for one million bucks back in 1993. Once The Fugitive debuted, the script got a hard push to become a female version of the hit movie (wait a minute, is this 1993 or 2023??), with the hope of it starring Jodie Foster or Geena Davis.

Ah, but then Hollywood enigma Steven Seagal somehow got a hold of the script and, all of a sudden, he wanted to make it. So the film was completely rewritten from a female to a male lead (check that – DEFINITELY not 2023).

Because Seagal duct-taped himself to Everglades trees and became impossible to contact, the project stalled and, unfortunately, never got made. But the script is supposed to be good and, since it’s a member of the ageless action-thriller genre, could probably be made today!

Let’s see if it’s any good.

Nick, who’s almost 40, is a lawyer in Washington D.C. We can tell Nick is different because while everyone else wears suits, Nick is just fine in cheap jeans and a ratty sports jacket. When we meet him, he’s helping an old reporter buddy of his, Jay, get off for some invasion of privacy charge. Jay rides right up next to the law whenever he investigates a story and so Nick constantly has to bail him out.

Afterwards, Nick reluctantly lets Jay borrow his car, as Jay’s got another story he’s chasing. But he says something chilling before he leaves. “If I die, it wasn’t an accident.” Nick notes the odd thought but doesn’t think much of it until later that evening, when he turns on the news and sees that Jay died in a car crash. Oh, and that so did Nick!

Nick, determined to correct this mistake, goes to the local police station where a buddy of his works and explains the situation. His buddy, though, looks very surprised to see him. Not just in a, “I thought you were dead in a car crash” way. But in a “You should not be alive right now” way. Nick senses this and makes a run for it. The cops start shooting at him and that’s when Nick knows for certain: Someone wants him dead.

Nick heads to an old lawyer girlfriend of his, Delia, who hooks Nick up with a lawyer she knows, Avery. The three decide it’s not safe to be in D.C. right now and head out of town. But on the toll road, Nick can’t help but keep looking in the rearview mirror at Avery and thinking something funny’s going on. At the toll booth, Nick leaps out of the car and both Avery and Delia start shooting at him.

Holy SH-T! Everyone wants Nick dead!

After being betrayed by several other friends, Nick goes back to an older girlfriend, an electrician named Casey, who has zero ties to D.C. Casey, still burned by their failed relationship, isn’t exactly thrilled to hang with her old beau, especially under these circumstances. But together they do some digging and find out that Jay was looking into some deep government program and the assumption is that Nick now knows about it too. So Nick will have to find out what this program is and expose it in order to save his life.

It was funny reading this script as I felt like I’d been taken back through a time warp. Right from the start, I could sense a different attitude towards script writing than I do today. The writer really REALLY wants you to turn the page. And it’s effective.

We’re at some remote lab and this seemingly innocuous woman walks up and just BAM shoots another woman in the face. We then cut to a security camera where we’re seeing some guy walking through another area of the lab and he JOLTS. A split-second later he falls. The same woman walks into frame, gun raised.

There was something about this all being done by a mild-mannered woman that surprised me and pulled me in. I now wanted to keep reading. And hence, how screenplays used to be written.

These days, there just isn’t that sense of urgency. The writer doesn’t seem nearly as worried about losing the reader. The reader needs to respect the time and attention *the writer* put into this script. The *reader*, in the 2023 writer’s eye, is the one who owes *them* their time. And it’s this attitude that leads to so many boring scripts.

Now you may be thinking I’m about to award 90s scripts, and this one in particular, the gold medal in screenwriting excellence. But the truth is, Dead Reckoning displays both strengths AND weaknesses of that era. The biggest weakness of those 90s big spec sale scripts is that they were all soooooo generic. There was very little innovation.

Blah blah blah some sort of political conspiracy. Blah blah blah a dozen generic chase scenes. Even when Dead Reckoning tries to differentiate itself, introducing a struggle inside a wacky machinists’s lab, it doesn’t feel right. It was almost as if, in an attempt to prove that they weren’t going to make this COMPLETELY cliche, they added this bizarre location. Except that it was so random, so disconnected from the rest of the script, that it didn’t work.

It’s one of those things rarely talked about in screenwriting. A random unique location isn’t proof that your script is different. Your locations, your scenes, still have to organically evolve from the story you’re telling to hold water.

This contrast makes Dead Reckoning very hard to judge, its familiarity constantly interjected with a dogged determination to keep the reader turning the pages. To that end, Dead Reckoning may have the most untrustworthy cast of characters ever. No one can be trusted, even former years-long girlfriends. There are so many people who try to kill Nick that the later scenes play out with tons of tension even when the writer isn’t trying to add any. We keep waiting for the shoe to drop. And it definitely infuses the script with a relentless energy.

Good, right?

Okay, but now quiz me on what the actual cover-up is in Dead Reckoning.

I DON’T KNOW.

Even though a good four scenes were dedicated to explaining it.

Again, 90s scripts seemed so uninterested in answers. They were more focused on the questions, on the mystery. And it sucks. Because one of the best moments in the script is when Nick turns on the TV and sees that he’s dead. And then, a few scenes later, when he goes to the cops, they look at him not as they’re happy he’s still alive. But that Nick isn’t supposed to be alive. And they’re going to finish the job.

That kind of extreme need to kill this man necessitates a kicka$$ explanation. If he needs to be eliminated to take care of a cover-up, then give me a great cover-up. Not Generic Black Contract Army Navy Secret Weapon Something-or-Other Cover-Up that’s in every script.

The Fugitive, which this script wants to be, didn’t have a mind-blowing explanation of why Richard needed to be framed for his wife’s murder. But it was very well plotted, constructed, and made sense. His wife’s work was threatening a very big release of a medical drug.

The truth is, most scripts written back in the 90s were front-loaded. They came in with big splashy first acts (you turn on the TV to see that you’ve been reported dead) and had no idea where to go from there. Which is why most of them devolved into the same type of third act that you see here. Some governmental program-weapon conspiracy.

And, honestly, I think this is why the spec boom died. Cause you had a whole bunch of great first acts but very few great second and third acts. So when all of these movies bombed, Hollywood said, “Enough is enough. We need a better model.” And they moved over to IP.

With that said, I don’t dislike these types of scripts. In fact, I love them. And the genre is always going to be in favor. What fits better into the movie format than thrills and action? But you have to write a good script. You have to write a COHESIVE script. You have to put just as much energy into acts 2 and 3 as you do that grabber of a 1st act. It’s not easy. But it can be done!

Script link: Dead Reckoning

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

What I learned: A great way to set up a character is to have them dress completely differently from the standard uniform that everyone else wears. Nick wears grubby jeans in a field of people who wear 2000 dollar suits. You can do the opposite of this, too. If everyone wears normal clothes, have your character wear a suit. Anything that stands out from the norm helps us identify your character. Also, characters who stand out in some way pop off the page better.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: Four women in their 80s who have built a weekly routine of watching Patriots games decide to travel to the Super Bowl together so they can see Tom Brady win, what they believe, will be his final Super Bowl.
About: When Tom Brady retired, he immediately set up the first movie for his brand new production company. This is that movie. It’s written by Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins, who are best known for writing the female Superbad, “Booksmart.” However, as often happens in Hollywood, Halpern and Haskins were rewritten by the director, Kyle Marvin, and Marvin’s producing partner, Michael Covino. Up until this point, Marvin and Covino have written a small TV show called “All Wrong,” and an indie movie about a couple of biking friends called “The Climb.” I’m guessing the friendship portrayed in “The Climb” is why Brady okay’d them to make his first film.
Writers: Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins (rewritten by Kyle Marvin and Michael Covino)
Details: 116 pages

Eagles vs. Niners. Bengals vs. Chiefs.

But no Brady. :(

Wait, what am I talking about? YES BRADY!

80 FOR BRADY!

At first glance, you might say, “Carson, this doesn’t seem like the kind of script you’d typically review. Have you gone loopy? Maybe being so wrong about The Last of Us has infected your brain.”

I’ll tell you exactly why I’m reviewing this. Everywhere I drive these days, I see a big fat billboard for 80 For Brady. And I’m looking up at that billboard and I’m thinking… they’re going to release that movie… IN THEATERS???

Meanwhile, at the end of this week, Jonah Hill is coming out with a new comedy called “You People.” Which I think looks great. However, Jonah Hill’s movie… IS ON STREAMING. Let that sink in for a second. The hip young comedy actor’s movie is on streaming while the movie with four 80 year old women gets a theatrical release.

What’s going on here?

The answer may lie in Tom Hanks’ most recent film, A Man Called Otto. The film is considered a huge success considering that nobody thought it would make 5 million dollars, much less 35 million.

What I think is happening is that the studios are starting to realize that they can still market theatrical movies to people who grew up going to the theater. Whereas, with the younger generation – they’re growing up expecting everything to be on TV. So you can’t really get them to leave the house unless you’ve got a 400 million dollar superhero film.

I think this newfound strategy is kinda interesting and I’m curious to see if it’s going to work.

80 year olds Lily, Carol, Jane, and Julie spend every single Sunday during the NFL season watching the Patriots – and more specifically, Tom Freaking Brady – play. It’s their little ritual. It’s their little group. And for one of them it’s *literally* what they live for.

Their group started back in 2001 when the girls were at Lily’s after she’d been diagnosed with cancer. They all wanted to watch TV but the remote ran out of batteries. So they were stuck – GASP – watching FOOTBALL! As it so happens, that’s the first game that Tom Brady played. And they instantly fell in love with him.  Brady then become Lily’s inspiration to fight!

Flash forward to the present and Lily is keeping a big secret from her friends. The cancer is back. And since this may be Brady’s last Super Bowl, she dips into her savings and buys four Super Bowl tickets. Off the four of them go to Houston, where the Pats are playing the Falcons (this is 2017).

Once there, it turns into The Hangover. They participate in NFL activities. They go to exclusive parties. They dance it up with Guy Ferieri! But of course their individual issues pull them apart during the trip. Jane just wants to get laid. Carol needs to break free of her needy husband. Lily keeps dodging her doctor’s calls. And Julie – actually, I can’t remember what was going on with her. Something relevant, I’m sure.

When their excessive partying leads to them losing the tickets, it looks like their Super Bowl dream is about to go the way of a Chicago Bears postseason. They’ll have to find another way into the game. Which, of course, they do. And when the Patriots go down by 25 points, it will be up to one of our four ladies to give Tom Brady the pep talk of his life.

There’s a screenwriting approach that a lot of writers – even professional writers (as we’re about to see) – resort to. It’s called the “Just Bear With Me” approach and it works like this: you know your heroes are going to go on this big adventure for the bulk of the movie. And that adventure is going to be fun.

So, for the first act, you say to your audience, “Just bear with me. I’m going to set up all the characters. I’m going to go through some annoying exposition and backstory. But if you bear with me, I promise you things will get better.”

That’s the approach 80 For Brady goes with. And it’s nearly a script-killer. I mean, I’m sorry, but the first fifteen(!!!) pages of this script are the characters in a room watching a Patriots game. After the game, one of them says, “Remember how this all started,” and we jump back 20 years to the same living room where we see them watch *another* Patriots game.

It’s lazy screenwriting like this that really confuses aspiring screenwriters because they’ve been told that their first act has to move like lightning. This first act moves like a sloth whose feet are coated with molasses.

I bring this up to remind aspiring screenwriters that today’s writers are only allowed to do this because they’ve already gotten paid. They are developing the script for a studio. So they don’t have to worry about winning over readers. You, on the other hand, have to come up with a WAAAAAY more interesting opening than this script. I can promise you that.

And I’m not excusing these writers. Because even if you are getting paid, you still owe it to yourselves to try. You should still attempt to entertain the reader in that opening act, and not just inundate them with information.

And I got news for you. Quippy dialogue isn’t enough. It helps. But little funny quips like, “Make sure you packed your prune juice” (my line, not theirs) aren’t enough to entertain the reader through fifteen pages of exposition. Funny dialogue should SUPPLEMENT the scene. Not be the only thing it has going for it.

Did anything in the script work?

Well, as I’ve said many times before, I like when scripts take advantage of their concept. Especially comedies. Give us comedic scenarios that can only occur in your screenplay. 80 for Brady has a few of those.

One of them was when the girls first went on their trip. They had to pick up Carol, the one “80” living at an old person’s home. And they get there only to find out she’s sleeping. The problem is, this home takes sleeping VERY SERIOUSLY. They NEVER wake their members up. So the girls have to sneak into this place, wake up Carol, and kidnap her.

It’s a lighthearted scene. It’s not anything special. But it was unique to the premise, which I liked.

Another one was the ending when the Patriots went down 25-0 and Lily sneaks up into the Offensive Coordinator’s booth, takes the coordinator’s microphone so she can give Brady a pep talk (which nicely connects with her own battle). I think most writers would’ve clumsily written some scene where the girls corner Tom Brady and try to hang out with him or something (it looks like they may have done exactly this in the rewrites). This was a more elegant connection between them and Brady. Dare I say it was perfect!

But these moments aren’t enough to overcome a standardly executed script with an extremely lazy first act. So, unfortunately, it wasn’t for me.

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

What I learned: Scripts work better with specificity. It’s always better than generality. So when the women first eat at a restaurant in Houston, the slugline says, “INT. FANCY RESTAURANT.” Come on, guys. It took me 3 seconds to google ‘best restaurants in Houston.’ “Brennan’s” came up. So there you go. “INT. BRENNAN’S RESTAURANT – NIGHT.” If you’re worried the reader won’t know it’s fancy, tell them it’s fancy in the first line of description underneath the slug!

What I learned 2: Pay attention to how this film does. Cause if it does well, you may see a new trend emerge – theatrical releases for former star actors and actresses 60 and up. Which means you can start writing specs for those actors.

The second episode always reveals the truth of whether you have a good show or a bad one

If you couldn’t tell by now, I’m fascinated by this series.

I think it’s kinda gangster, and also kinda insane, to try and make a show that looks exactly like another show that happens to be one of the most popular shows of all time in The Walking Dead.

So from a screenwriting perspective, I’m interested in how you get around that. It’s a big challenge. And I wanted to see how they were going to do it. I became even more interested when they went all in on the marketing. It showed they were really backing this show. So maybe they did figure out the trick to make it work.

But then last week, the same thing that happens to me when I read a bad script happened to me when I watched the pilot. Which is that these little red flags popped up. The super-generic post-apocalyptic city, for example. A main character who wasn’t compelling enough to carry an entire series. A secondary character – the girl – who has some standard lame secret power that’s going to be revealed later.

All of it felt way too familiar.

And that’s why I’m reviewing this second episode. I’m curious to see if my suspicions are correct. I believe that this show is in major trouble. The only hope I have for it is if they sacrificed story quality for setup purposes.

The weakness I saw in that pilot were a crippling reminder of how critical character is in a TV show. If we don’t fall in love with those characters right away… the show is screwed. And what’s so frustrating about screenwriting is that, theoretically, I should like Joel. We meet him, we see how much he loves his daughter, then watch his daughter get killed in front of him. Why am I not all-in on this guy?

I don’t know. All I know is that when we fast-forward 20 years Joel is this grumpy guy you kind of sort of like but also don’t. You know who he reminded me of? Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Obi-Wan show. Same idea. Grumpy. Head down. Goes to work every day. “Grumpy” is a tough character trait to make work. Audiences generally don’t like grumpy people. It’s possible, of course. “Up” did it. But, usually, it’s a bad move.

I want to be proven wrong about all this. Let’s get into episode 2’s plot and see if I was.

In this episode, we start back in 2003 in Jakarta. It’s here, apparently, where the virus was born and is starting to spread. The government’s head scientist determines that there’s no hope and they should immediately start bombing the city they’re in!

Cut to Joel and Ellie (the little girl) and Tess (the girlfriend) in the present. The three need to get through downtown Boston for some reason that isn’t well explained at all. I think they’re going to a courthouse for some reason? It’s confusing.

That setup is mostly an excuse to start playing with this world and seeing what it looks like. Buildings have fallen over onto each other. Hotel lobbies have become frog ponds. And the infected monster people are scattered about in various locations. Although, surprisingly, for most of our trio’s journey, we barely see them.

Eventually, our group get to the courthouse – again, I don’t know why they’re going there but they get there – and that’s when Tess reveals that she’s infected. Which means she’s going to have to off herself soon. Joel and Ellie then have to get out of Dodge, leaving Tess to lure in some other monsters so she can take them out along with herself. The End.

So… was I entertained?

Funny enough, this episode felt a lot like the first episode. It started off strong. Then got worse from there.

The show’s central problem continues to be its weak characters. Joel doesn’t talk much and, when he does, he usually says boring stuff. Tess is like a female version of Joe. She’s equally as moody and talks in that sort of angry whisper that all cliched characters in these shows talk like.

I guess Ellie, the girl, is supposed to be the comedic relief. But comedic reliefs only work when they’re not annoying.

With that said, at least we’re on the move now. We’re walking through this city. There’s potential danger around every corner, which heightens the tension whenever we’re in a scene.

But there’s just no X-FACTOR here. There’s nothing about this show to get you excited. Nobody’s going to finish an episode of this show, text their friend, and say, “Oh my God, did you see the latest episode of Last of Us!!??” And that’s what you need these days. Because the modern day equivalent of telling your friends is telling the internet. So if nobody’s running to social media to talk about how awesome the episode was, your show is in trouble.

House of the Dragon had that quality. White Lotus had that quality. This is missing something. And I think the problem is two-fold. Boring characters and a world that’s too familiar.

The one big difference between this show and The Walking Dead, I guess, is that these zombies are more like monsters. They can morph into more exciting beings. But is looking forward to these monsters enough to drive an entire show? I don’t think it is.

What matters most is CHARACTER. We need to love the characters. I wish I could put up one post a week that just repeated that line a thousand times. And I’m not even going to lay all this at the feet of the writers. Casting comes into this too. This is the fourth role in a row for Pedro Pascal where I am not impressed by him at all (Mandalorian, WW1984, The Bubble were the other three). I’m not sure how this guy became popular. But I think he’s freaking boring. He’s like Gerard Butler without the charm. So that’s probably playing into it why the show feels stuck in second gear.

Look. This show is better than some of the other high-profile releases that have come out recently. Rings of Power. Willow. Obi-Wan. But it’s nowhere near the class of House of the Dragon, White Lotus, and Stranger Things. It’s not even as good as Westworld.

This marks the last time I will watch The Last of Us. What about you?

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

What I learned: I love the writing move of a character sitting down somewhere random and the military comes up to get them, because this person is needed by the president to help them figure out a top secret problem. I love that moment where they walk up, stop in front of them, and then no words are spoken. We just cut to them in the car. Or in the helicopter. Because why do you need your characters to say anything? The audience understands what’s going on. Don’t write a line if you don’t have to. — This happens in the opening of this episode.

It’s here!

If you are unaware what the Logline Showdown is, every second-to-last Friday of the month, I will post five loglines that were submitted to me. You, the readers of this site, will then vote for your favorite in the comments section. I will then review the script of the logline that received the most votes the following Friday.

This is the first of the showdowns. But don’t worry if you didn’t make it into the inaugural one. These are coming every single month. Just get me your logline submission by the second-to-last Thursday (by 10pm Pacific Time) and you’re in the running! The next deadline will be Thursday, February 16th, at 10pm Pacific Time. I need your title, genre, and logline. Send all submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com.

Also, this is a reminder that a lot of your are shooting yourselves in the foot with your loglines.  You’re making catastrophic mistakes that give you no shot at script requests.  It genuinely hurts me to see because you may have a good script but nobody’s going to want to read it until you’re able to properly write a logline for it.  If you want a logline consult with me, they’re cheap. They’re just $25.  E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com

Okay, now it’s on to the submissions.  You don’t even have to read any scripts this time!  So I expect the votes to come fast and furious.  Voting ends Sunday night, 11:59pm Pacific Time!

Good luck everybody!

Title: Call of Judy
Genre: Action/Adventure
Logline: When a lonely kid gets lost in a next-gen VR gaming experience, the only person who can rescue him is his mom, who’s never played a videogame in her life.

Title: Daughter of Twilight
Genre: Horror
Logline: Dr. Kate Grant’s new patient at Bellevue Hospital claims she is the only survivor of a massacre in the year 1920…and swears the killer is chasing her through time. But when the killer actually appears in 21st century New York and starts slaughtering Kate’s patients, she must find a way to stop him before he murders again.

Title: A Brief History of Los Angeles
Genre: Thriller/Dark Comedy
Logline: Desperate to improve their social status, a disgraced divorcee and an ambitious event planner team up to host a charity gala but the night is derailed when a guest unexpectedly dies and they must dispose of the body before anybody finds out.

Title: Poker Dollface
Genre: Crime heist
Logline: In 1960’s Dallas, a desperate wife of a losing gambler forms the Dollfaces, a group of misfit bandits who go on a spree of robbing underground cardrooms run by the mafia to win back her husband’s losses.

Title: Cougar
Genre: Thriller
Logline: Two desperate siblings cruise Hollywood, preying upon the loose pockets of drunken partiers to fund their mother’s stay at an assisted living facility, until they find themselves in the crosshairs of their latest target – an older seductress with a sinister secret.