Every second-to-last Friday of the month, I post the five best loglines submitted to me. You, the readers of the site, will vote for your favorite in the comments section. I then review the script of the logline that received the most votes the following Friday.

This month we’re doing something different. We’re reviewing TV PILOT loglines. As much as I love movies, the bread and butter of the writing industry is TV. So we gotta give TV folk some love! This is your time to shine, TV folk. Don’t disappoint us!

If you want to participate in a future showdown, we’ll be back to highlighting feature film loglines next month. The deadline for that is Thursday, August 24th, 10pm Pacific Time. All I need is your title, genre, and logline. Send all submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com.

If you’re one of the many writers who feel helpless when it comes to loglines, I offer logline consultations. They’re cheap – just $25. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you’re interested.

Okay, time to get to the loglines.  Voting closes on Sunday, 11:59pm, Pacific Time.

Title: BEYOND HELP with Handy Andy
Genre: 30-minute mockumentary sitcom
Logline: A parody of ‘makeover’ reality shows, Beyond Help with Handy Andy follows overconfident yet completely incompetent “Handy Andy” Cornwall as he travels the country documenting his attempts to fix everything from failing restaurants to broken marriages, in the hopes of selling his half-assed reality show to a network. Look out, America. He’s helping!

Title: Quiet Zone
Genre: Thriller/Drama
Logline: In a small town located within the ‘Quiet Zone’ – an area of the country where cell service, WiFi and other transmissions are banned due to a secretive government research facility – an ambitious journalist investigates a string of missing persons cases and finds herself unraveling a larger conspiracy as she begins to expose the dark secrets within the zone.

Title: CREATURES OF HABIT
Genre: Supernatural Comedy
Logline: An impulsive vampire searching for her soulmate and her eclectic group of friends struggle with love, morality, immortality, and keeping their supernatural identities secret in New Orleans’ French Quarter. It’s Friends meets The Vampire Diaries.

Title: Mr. Pink
Genre: Half-Hour Adult Animated Comedy
Logline: Set in Key West amidst eccentric locals, drunken tourists, and a cult-like butterfly conservatory, an insecure flamingo fights to maintain his macho persona in order to win over the heart of his potential mate.

Title: The President’s New Clothes
Genre: Comedy, Absurd Comedy
Logline: A blue-collar construction worker from Texas struggles to maintain his integrity in the murky swamp of Washington D.C after he’s suddenly elected to Congress.

Title: Critical
Genre: Comedy/Horror 30-minute
Logline: A famously sour film critic learns that the characters and creations belonging to the works he’s given his most scathing reviews to have come to life to kill him.

Title: MR. HOLLYWOOD
Genre: Drama
Logline: Mercurial movie star Nate Moore, self-loathing and borderline narcissistic, is at an emotional crossroads. On the verge of a breakdown because of vapid Hollywood excess he returns to his small hometown, where he left a trail of destruction six years ago, determined to win back the heart of his childhood sweetheart and reconnect with his estranged family.

I love The Bear. It’s an extremely well-written show. So I thought, let’s bring “10 Screenwriting Tips” out of retirement so we can learn what screenwriting tricks The Bear is using to be so goooooood!

1) Obstacle Mania – Whatever your characters’ giant goal is, your job, especially in a TV show, is to place as many obstacles in front of that goal as you can. The Bear, Season 2, does this better than any show I’ve seen in recent memory. The goal is to open a new fancy restaurant. We’ve got IRS issues. Fire regulations. Finding an investor. Open in just three months. Mold. Walls falling down. Hiring competent staff. The list is never-ending. Obstacles create UNCERTAINTY IN THE NARRATIVE. Which is what you want. You want the reader to be unsure if the characters can do it.

2) Put your characters where they least want to be – Where you find the most drama in a story is when you place characters in places they do not want to be. Richie, the screw-up of the family, hates order and responsibility more than anyone in the world. This guy only thrives in chaos and disorder. In season 2, episode 7, Carmy gets Richie a job in the kitchen of the best restaurant in Chicago. Needless to say, the restaurant thrives specifically on order and responsibility. You can see Richie boiling over just standing in this place. It is the antithesis of him. Which is exactly why we can’t look away. This episode, “Forks,” is my favorite episode of Season 2 because of this lesson.

3) Intense conversations work better when at least one of the people in the conversation doesn’t want to be there – Intense dramatic conversations about life don’t usually play well. They often feel self-indulgent and fake cause kumbaya “I’m all up in my feelings” moments don’t happen all that often in real life. So a way to make them more palatable is to have at least one of the characters in the conversation not want to be there. In season 2, episode 1, an “up in his feelings” Richie is downstairs in the basement feeling bad for himself. Carmy comes down to grab something and Richie blurts out, “You ever think about purpose?” Carmy looks at him and says, “I love you but I don’t have time for this.” But then he sees Richie is really in the doldrums and decides to stay, reluctantly. Richie then makes his big, “I don’t feel any purpose” plea, and Carmy’s not really into it. He has a million things to do. But he stays and listens to the best of his ability. Carmy’s half-interest is what makes this scene work. Cause if they’re both really into this conversation, it’ll feel false.

4) Compounding outside pressure – One of the things The Bear does really well is it places pressure on its characters. But that’s par for the course. Every character should have pressure on them. What The Bear does, though, is it compounds that pressure. It adds ADDITIONAL PROBLEMS to the characters’ lives, which makes every scene feel even heavier, even more important. In “Forks,” midway through the episode, Richie calls his ex-wife, who he’s secretly hoping to get back together with, to manage a situation with their daughter. And the ex-wife tells him that she just accepted a guy’s proposal. This is what compounding pressure looks like. You never let your character off the hook. And the great thing about compounding pressure is that now, whenever Richie encounters an issue in the restaurant, we’re more afraid he’s going to crack. Cause we know that there’s additional things going on in his life.

5) The Scene Agitator – I would be surprised if creator Christopher Storer has not read Scriptshadow Secrets because this man LOVES the scene agitator. As a reminder, the scene agitator is any element you can add to a scene that agitates the characters in some way. Storer rarely lets two characters just talk to each other. He almost always has a third variable in play. For example, in season 2, episode 7, when Richie calls his cousin, Carmy, back at the restaurant, to ask him some questions, the team’s fix-it guy, Neil, is trying to fix a faulty outlet wire, which keeps electrocuting him. So Carmy is trying to talk to Richie while occasionally stopping the conversation to yell at Neil. “Neil! What are you doing! Get away from that thing.” Neil is the agitator here, and provides a more unpredictable conversation between Carmy and Richie.

6) Pronouns and Role Play – This is a preview tip from my dialogue book. A great way to spice up dialogue is to have the characters in the scene playfully use the wrong pronouns as well as use role play, pretending they’re not the people they really are. It allows for a unique conversation that always feels more creative than the on-the-nose version most writers write. In season 2, episode 8, Ebraheim, an old-timer chef at the former restaurant who bailed when Carmy decided to upgrade the restaurant, comes back a couple of weeks before the new restaurant is opening. He runs into his old buddy, Tina, who still works there.

7) Nobody’s angry just because they’re angry. They’re angry because they’re scared – I read a lot of scripts where characters are angry because the writer wants an angry character. But they don’t think about WHY that character is angry. And WHY they’re angry is the whole ball of wax. Because most of the time, they’re angry because they’re scared. Cause they don’t think they can hack it. Like Richie. Richie is my favorite character in this show because of that inner conflict. He’s the loudest. He’s the harshest. He screams at people all the time. When he messes up, it’s always somebody else’s fault. And it’s all because he’s terrified. He’s terrified he’s going to be exposed for the scared little kid he actually is. So when a character is angry, give them a reason for being angry. I promise you, the character is going to come off as so much more genuine if you do.

8) Money makes the TV show go round – Money money money monaaaaay. MONNNAAAY. Money is a wonderful friend in any dramatically told story, but especially in television. The thing with TV is that it doesn’t have that ticking time bomb urgency that a movie can have since a movie is only 2 hours. With TV, the timespan is always longer and so we lose out on that urgency. You can compensate for this by adding a money issue. Your main character(s) should be under some sort of monetary deadline. With The Bear, in order to get the investment for the restaurant, Carmy has to agree that if his uncle isn’t paid back in full within 18 months, the uncle gets the building. Never having enough money is such a universal experience that we always relate to money problems in stories.

9) Make sure to balance the sour with the sweet – The Bear puts its characters through the wringer. It really whacks them up against the head with a lot of crap. If all you do, though, is hurt your characters, your reader will grow frustrated. We’re not sadists. We need good amongst your bad. And The Bear is good at this. It makes sure to intersperse the bad with a nice little occasional scene that gives you the warm and fuzzies inside. In the first episode of season 2, there’s a scene near the end of a tough episode where Sydney, the smart-as-a-whip prodigy sous-chef, runs after Tina, the old school “been here forever” cook who’s accepted her lackluster lot in life. Sydney asks Tina if she would be her assistant. And we just see Tina’s eyes light up when she realizes what Sydney is asking. It’s such a sweet moment as well as a NEEDED ONE. Because we need the sweet within the sour.

10) Scenes With a Lot of Characters In Them – The Bear has a ton of scenes with a lot of characters in them. For these scenes to work, you need to know who your CONTROLLING CHARACTER in the scene is. Your controlling character is the character who wants the most out of the scene. They have the big objective that’s driving the core of the conversation. So in Season 2, Episode 5, five minutes in, Uncle Jimmy (the investor) shows up to the restaurant to check on things. He walks into a room with, literally, seven other characters and everyone in the scene talks at some point. But the scene keeps coming back to Uncle Jimmy because he’s the controlling character. He is the one who wants the most out of this scene. He wants to know that they’re going to be ready to freaking open when they said they’re going to be ready. So that’s what drives most of the conversation, is his questions and directives regarding that topic.

100 dollars off a Screenplay Consultation (feature or pilot) if you e-mail me with the subject line, “THE BEAR!” carsonreeves1@gmail.com.  What are you waiting for??

This weekend, I found myself checking the box office numbers for the weekend and noticing that the two top movies (Elemental and Spider-Verse) were holdovers, and that neither cracked 20 million. The big new release, No Hard Feelings, sputtered to the finish line with 15 million dollars.

We are in the middle of summer!  Summer is when everyone’s supposed to go to the movies!  And not a single film made 20 million bucks?  What’s going on here??

When I fell in love with movies, box office was everything.

Because box office was the unequivocal deciding factor on whether a movie mattered or not.

Some of the most exciting moments for a movie geek like myself were when a film would come out of nowhere and do these amazing things at the box office that had never been done before.

For example, I remember how The Sixth Sense made 26 million dollars its opening weekend. And then it made 25 million its second weekend. That had NEVER happened. Not for a movie that had already gone wide. A 1% drop? It was unheard of. Three weeks later, it actually made MORE money that weekend than the previous one.

Then you had the opening weekend record-setters. The Phantom Menace opening to 65 million. Harry Potter opening to 90 million. Spider-Man opening to 115 million. Dead Man’s Chest opening to 135 million. The Dark Knight opening to 160 million!

There was excitement in the air whenever a big movie opened. Everyone talked about how much it could possibly make.

But these days, the numbers don’t seem to matter to people anymore. I don’t say that in a sad way. I’ve just noticed that people don’t talk about box office like they used to.

Consider Avatar 2. The film made 2.3 billion dollars at the box office. That’s the third most money a movie has ever made. Have you heard anyone touting that number? Have you heard anyone care about it? “Hey! Did you see Avatar 2 crossed 2 billion?!” Nobody’s said that to me. The trades felt like they had a gun to their head every time they reported about the film’s box office success.

So, what’s causing this change?  Where is this apathy coming from?

The most obvious reason is the pandemic. Going to the movies was a habit people had. When you take that habit away for two years, it makes people evaluate whether that habit was valuable to them. Somewhere between 20-30% of the people who had that habit realized it wasn’t very valuable.  And now they’re not going to movies anymore.

Rise of streamers – I’m not one of these people who think that being able to watch a movie or a new show at home is automatically better than being able to watch a movie at the theater. Because a big reason you go to the theater is to get out of the house. It’s cheap entertainment. And it’s fun to meet a friend or to go on a date and watch a movie together. With that said, streamers have given us SO MUCH MORE content that theatrical movies face more competition than they ever have before.

Also, streamers re-introduced a notion that had been absent from the industry for 40 years – no box office reporting. When a movie came out on streaming, you literally had no idea how many people had seen it. I remember when I Care A Lot came out. That movie got people talking. But we still had no idea, relatively speaking, how many people cared. Was it a 20 million dollar opening level of interest or a 50 million dollar opening level of interest? After we got 30+ streaming releases without that box office answer, we started to get used to the idea that box office didn’t matter all that much.

Next we have the politicization of movies. Mainstream films have more politicized themes than at any other time in history and it’s definitely hurting the box office. If there’s even a whiff of a movie promoting some political angle that conservatives or liberals don’t like, you’ve lost half your audience right there. It’s put moviegoers on edge and made them less trusting. Anything that gives people pause about going to the movies is going to eat into the box office. Which makes you wonder why they’re doing it.

The King of The Box Office has already happened – Avengers Endgame ruined everything. The movie made 350 million dollars its opening weekend. Nobody’s going to beat that. One of the things that audiences used to get excited about was, “Will this movie beat The Dark Knight?” Or, “Will this movie beat The Force Awakens?” Avengers Endgame is Wilt Chamberlin’s 100 point game. It ended the discussion. Which takes a lot of the fun out of the box office. If we’ve already hit our limit, it implies that we’re not growing anymore.

The younger generation doesn’t care – The GenZ’ers don’t get excited about this stuff. They’re more interested in how many views a tiktok video got. Or how many subs a content creator has. Box office isn’t on their list. Also, since this generation is growing up on streaming, their world of content is more immediate, and less about going out and seeing a film. Especially because if you go out and see a film, you risk getting triggered on the way there. I kid. But seriously, content on devices is more important to this generation than content on giant screens.

Finally, movies are no longer our zeitgeist moments – Back in the day, if a big movie came out and everyone was seeing it, you felt like you needed to see it too so you were in the know, so you were a part of the cool club. Movies aren’t like that anymore. The best example of this is the fact that we don’t have people quoting movies anymore. Everybody in the world knew the line “I’ll be back,” after The Terminator. Does anybody know one memorable line from last summer’s biggest movie, Top Gun? They’re more likely to know Paul Rudd’s line from his Hot Ones interview (“Look at us”).

This is because interest has been specialized. Instead of us all liking one big thing, our interest is divided into 20 smaller more specialized things. I love The Bear. But I just tried to have a conversation about it with my neighbor and they thought I was talking about a traveling circus. “No, it’s a show about a fast food restaurant in Chicago.” “I’m confused. When does the bear come in exactly?”

This used to be the reason why everyone would watch the same things. Cause they all interacted with each other and wanted common ground to talk about. But the internet and, more specifically, social media, changed that. If your neighbor or chem class partner didn’t watch The Bear, no problem. You can go online and talk to your pal, Choi, from Hong Kong, who loves The Bear so much he’s redecorated his place to look like the inside of Carmy’s apartment.

So what does it all mean? Is this a bad thing?

Sort of. Yeah.

In a way, the industry set themselves up for this. They’re the ones that celebrated the numbers. They’re the ones that touted from the rooftops that a Hollywood film had made 350 million dollars in a single weekend.

So now when Transformers Battle of the Armadillos makes 60 million dollars its opening weekend, you’ve conditioned the masses not to care about that. It’s literally one-sixth of what Avengers made. Why would I watch that film? Or Fast X at 67 million. Or No Time to Die at 55 million. Even when The Batman came out and made 134 million, I remember thinking, “Is that good for a Batman movie? Is it bad?” I didn’t know!

But the discussion is broader than that. Because I don’t think people care even when a movie does make a lot of money. The discussion is less about the money and more about the movie. When Top Gun became such a big hit, I didn’t hear anyone discuss how much money it was making. I heard people talking about how fun it was. How it was the perfect summer movie.  But nobody was like, “Top Gun just passed 400 million!”

Which may be the silver lining here. Maybe now that we don’t have box office chains wrapped around our wrists and ankles, we can just appreciate that a movie is good. I’m fine with that. Box office has been a camouflage for bad movies for too long. Doing away with that unnecessary distraction allows us to see more clearly. I think I’m going to like a post box office Hollywood.

Every second-to-last Friday of the month, I will post the best five loglines submitted to me. You, the readers of the site, will vote for your favorite in the comments section. I then review the script of the logline that received the most votes the following Friday.

If you didn’t enter this month’s showdown, don’t worry! We do this every month. And next month, we’re having a special showdown JUST FOR PILOTS. I’ve gotten a ton of e-mails asking me why I don’t give pilot writers their time in the sun. Well, now their time has come. The deadline for Pilot Logline Showdown is Thursday, July 20th, 10pm Pacific Time. All I need is your title, genre, and logline. Send all submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com.

If you’re one of the many writers who feel helpless when it comes to loglines, I offer logline consultations. They’re cheap – just $25.  E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you’re interested.

I’m adding a little surprise this showdown since there are a full two months before the next feature logline competition. We’ve got SEVEN loglines to choose from. Oh yeah, baby!

Voting ends Sunday night, 11:59pm Pacific Time!

Title: Bubblehead Saves the Day
Genre: Teen Comedy
Logline: When two high school seniors discover a robot from outer space, they ignore its warning of an imminent alien invasion and reprogram it to help them score with chicks!

Title: Fragments
Genre: Mystery & Suspense / Thriller
Logline: A blacklisted nurse is approached by a detective with a unique job offer: become the caretaker for an acquitted murderer who may be faking his Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

Title: DEADLY FORCE
Genre: True-life crime drama/thriller
Logline: The true story of Jim Simone, one of the most decorated and reviled cops in the nation, a real-life Dirty Harry and Serpico, touted as a hero and a serial killer, he waged a deadly one-man war against criminals, corrupt cops, and the press, meting out his own brand of justice no matter what it cost him or his family.

Title: The Man Who Came From The River
Genre: Sci-fi / Period / Thriller
Logline: When his time machine malfunctions, a black man from a post apocalyptic future must team up with a young Confederate soldier to find his son in Civil War era Virginia.

Title: ALIMONY
Genre: Romantic-Comedy
Logline: When a founder of a dating app realizes her deadbeat husband’s alimony payments are bleeding her dry, she embarks on a mission to find him a new wife before her company goes public.

Title: The King of Ghosts
Genre: Drama
Logline: When a Haitian fencing master is reunited with his estranged daughter, he must decide between pursuing a new life with her, or remaining in a violent world of underground machete fighting with the orphan boy he’s caring for.

Title: Death’s Jaws At Her Back
Genre: Action/Horror
Logline: An ex-soldier is forced to confront her traumatic past when she becomes hunted by the product of a decades old Nazi experiment — an indestructible monster known as the Überkrieger.

24 hours left to get your June Logline Showdown loglines in (10pm Pacific, Thursday night)! Send your title, genre, and logline to carsonreeves3@gmail.com! Best five loglines will duke it out this weekend. Winner gets a review!

A couple of days ago I engaged in an activity I detest, which was to defiantly write off something I didn’t like. I just had to let the world know, in comment-form, that I hated “Joan is Awful.”

Is it possible, even once in your life, Carson, to keep your opinion to yourself? I guess not.

I watched half the episode and I was so put off by its annoying repetitive nature, that I accompanied my power-off of Netflix with a giant grunt. “What a waste of time,” I said, before posting my “Joan is Awful is awful” comment on Scriptshadow.

But the next night, something compelled me to finish it. And by the time I got done with those last 25 minutes, I’d changed my mind. I liked Joan is Awful quite a bit.

What changed?

I’ll answer that question in a second. Because the thing that changed my mind is a screenwriting mega-tool if you know how to use it. The problem is that it’s the hardest screenwriting tool of all to use.

I’m talking about… THEME.

Theme has always been weird. It’s like UFOs. They’re right up there in the sky but you can never quite see them. Theme is always blurry.

If you don’t believe me, google your favorite movie and ask, “What’s the theme of this movie?” I looked up Toy Story for example. I got five different themes spat back at me! Loyalty was one. The bond between kids and their toys was another. Learning to let go was another. The evils of jealousy. Self-acceptance was one.

If it’s that difficult to agree on a movie’s theme, then how effective of a tool is it?

I’m reminded of an article I wrote a couple years ago about White Lotus, specifically its theme of how the rich exploit the poor. This was what Mike White himself, the creator of White Lotus, in an interview, said was his theme. And yet I still had people in the comments telling me I didn’t “get” the show cause I got the theme wrong. It was, rather, about racism. Or the cluelessness of the 1%. Or the eradication of the Polynesian population.

That’s my issue with theme. Is that if you ask five people what the theme of a movie is, you get five different answers. And if theme is that loosey-goosey, can it really be quantified and taught?

Getting back to Joan is Awful, the episode is about an unhappy woman named Joan who works at a tech company, who, one day, comes home to watch Netflix with her boring boyfriend, only to find a new show called “Joan is Awful.” The show stars Selma Hayek, and Selma’s hair looks exactly like Joan’s.

Curious, they play the show. And a scene starts playing that is the exact same thing that happened to Joan earlier that day at work. As the episode continues, more scenes from Joan’s real life impossibly play. It becomes clear that, somehow, the show is a shot-for-shot recreation of Joan’s life, as it’s happening, including private jabs at her boyfriend, who breaks up with Joan even before finishing episode 2.

What follows is a rather convoluted series of events where Joan seeks out Selma Hayek (this is where I originally gave up on the show), and the two learn that AI is creating these episodes, using the digital likenesses of Selma and others. They then agree that they must destroy the supercomputer that’s creating these shows.

Enter Netflix’s CEO, who’s similar to the Architect (Matrix reference). She explains to Joan why they’re doing this. Joan’s show is a test-run. Netflix’s goal is to create real-life direct content for each and every subscriber on the streamer. Everybody will soon have their own tailored “Joan is Awful” show to watch.

Something about this explanation hit me. We are all so desperate for content. We want more more more. Despite there literally being tens of thousands of shows on demand, we’re still not happy. The logical endpoint for this is an AI supercomputer that can create endless shows catered for every individual on-the-fly. We’ll never run out of content.

This insatiable appetite for content cannot end well. And what the show is really saying is, let’s stop before it gets that far. Let’s go outside for once instead of binging The Bear season 2 (which I plan to do this weekend). The message (the theme), in that sense, is to live life, not content.

That’s when I realized why Black Mirror is so popular. Black Mirror shouldn’t be popular at all in this day and age. It’s not a continuous storyline. It’s not mega-IP like the Avengers or Star Wars. It doesn’t get to cheat and bring back characters the audience already likes. It has to start from scratch every time. And yet it still remains relevant. It still remains good. How does it do that?

In my review of “Match Cut” on Tuesday, I pointed out that you have to give your script a soul for it to resonate with people. Ashley chimed in in the comments with this observation: “I think if it feels like a soul is missing in a movie, it’s often because it’s missing a theme.” And that was an ah-ha moment for me.

That’s what Black Mirror does so well. It makes sure that every episode has a powerful theme. And that theme is what provides the episode with a soul. So when you watch a Black Mirror episode, whether you like it or not, you feel like you watched something that’s hit you on a deeper level.

I still don’t know the secret to coming up with a theme that everybody who watches a movie agrees on is *the* theme. Even a brief google search for Joan Is Awful’s theme gave me two themes that did not conclude what I just concluded. But I know that if you try to include a theme in your work, it has a much better chance of resonating with people. Look no further than Black Mirror’s sustained success as proof of that.