Let’s be honest.

The Hollywood box office hasn’t exactly been on fire lately.

Pretty much everything is landing in “average” to “bomb” territory.

It’s led to a lot of people predicting the end of the movie business.

Except that Wicked Part 2 just made 150 million dollars.

This leaves Hollywood in a collective state of, ‘What the hell just happened?!?’

For an industry that’s been desperately trying to find its identity all year, Wicked’s success is going to create more questions than answers.

Because, while the news is awesome for Hollywood, it doesn’t exactly give it a roadmap moving forward. Big flamboyant musicals are not going to be the next superheroes. You probably can get one more big musical event movie out of this trend – and it will be Grease – but after that, you’re right back to square one. You need to figure out what’s going to replace the dying superhero genre.

What I can say about Wicked is that it may have cemented “event films” replacing “high concept films.” What’s the difference? High concept films are films where all the fun is on the screen. It’s Jurassic Park. It’s Fast and Furious. It’s Mission Impossible.

In contrast, event films are films where the fun is on the screen AND IN THE AUDIENCE. Event films are films you can dress up for. Event films are films you can be loud and celebratory during. Wicked, Minecraft, Barbie. These are event films.

They create this big fun atmosphere that people want to be a part of. Which makes sense when you think about it. It’s been so difficult for the movie business to pry eyeballs away from all the other types of media – TV, TikTok, Youtube, Instagram – that the films that were finally able to do it were the ones that added that extra element. It’s not just fun on the screen. It’s fun in the audience as well.

What does this mean for screenwriters?

Basically nothing.

It’s almost impossible to create an event from a spec script. There needs to be an element of pre-existence to the property. If you want to get into a more nuanced conversation, then, sure, you could game-plan your next spec to show that you’d be a good hire to write one of these films.

So, you could write something like Street Allie Punches Her Ticket and you would definitely get in the kinds of rooms that would allow you to pitch your take on Minecraft.

By the way – pro tip. If you want to prove that you can write for a franchise, write a spec script that’s a little bit darker than the franchise you want to write for. So, if you wanted to write Minecraft, you wouldn’t write a tone that exactly matches Minecraft. I promise you executives will think you’re too safe of a choice if you do that. They like to hire the writer who’s got a little more edge to him, even though, ironically, they’re going to sanitize that edge once you actually start writing for them.

Okay, moving on to what I really want to talk about today, which is Pluribus, episode 4.

I am happy to say that I’m officially on board for the rest of the season. For some of you, this might be boring news. But I consider it a very big deal. My bar for TV gets higher every year. I am having to MUSCLE my way through The Beast Within Me, barely getting through 20 minutes a night before I turn it off.

But Pluribus is shaping up to be the antidote to all these samey shows. I watch every episode start to finish. Probably because it’s a show that challenges a lot of screenwriting norms.

In the most recent episode, Zosia (Carol’s concierge) is recovering at the hospital from the grenade blast in the previous episode.

Carol heads home to see a bunch of people cleaning up around her house (from the grenade blast) and gets an idea. She invites one of them inside (biker guy) and asks him what he thinks of her books (Carol is a writer).

The biker guy says they love her books. They genuinely think they’re amazing. So Carol next asks what Helen (her dead girlfriend) thought of her books. Biker Guy is much more hesitant. She has to poke and prod him but he eventually admits that she didn’t like them.

From this, Carol gathers some valuable intel. These people cannot lie.

So Carol heads off to see Zosia and asks her: Is there a way to reverse this virus taking over the world? Zosia gets very uncomfortable and says that is an answer she cannot provide. From this, Carol deduces the answer is yes. But she must figure out a way to get that information out of Zosia.

Her plan? Heroin.

Carol requests heroin, injects herself with it and records the results at her home. Afterwards, she watches the recording, where she sees herself confessing every bit of truth in her brain (including that she wants to bang Zosia) and decides that, yup, this is going to work.

She then heads back to the hospital, covertly escorts Zosia outside while secretly dumping the heroin into her saline drip. Zosia proceeds to get very high and Carol asks her the question again: “How do I reverse your takeover of our planet?”

Zosia struggles to resist and gets close to giving her the answer but then everyone at the hospital comes out and surrounds Carol and Zosia, trying to convince Carol to stop. The heroin then throws Zosia into cardiac arrest and that’s the end of the episode.

One of the more interesting things about Gilligan’s post Breaking Bad career is that he places his storytelling within these very slow narratives. And this is the most dangerous area to be in as a screenwriter because you really need to know what you’re doing to keep a slow story entertaining.

It’s almost like you’re playing with a handicap.

But, this episode shows us how to do it well. Just like any good story, you want to set up a goal. In this case, the goal is: find out how to reverse the virus takeover of humanity.

Now, the thing with goals is they are only as powerful as the stakes attached to them. And, lucky for Gilligan, the stakes of this goal are enormous. Carol is literally trying to save every person on the planet. Those are bigger stakes than the Avengers trying to defeat Thanos.

That’s a big part of what’s driving the interest behind this show. Is that the stakes are so so high. But if you want to turbocharge a character with a goal and stakes, you can take it one step further and make the goal as hard as it can possibly be.

Which is what Gilligan has done. We do not see any scenario by which our heroine can save these 8 billion people.

And guess what: THAT’S EXACTLY WHY WE KEEP WATCHING.

If the goal were easy, we wouldn’t need to watch. Because we’d know that our hero would eventually figure it out.

This trio – A goal, that the goal is impossible, and high stakes – is what makes this incredibly simple episode compelling. All that’s happening here is someone is asking another person questions. It’s as simple a plan you’re going ot find. But, if those above factors are in place, Carol’s plan is exciting. A lot of writers forget that.

I also want to note that Gilligan solved the problem I brought up after episode 1, which is that there was no clear unresolved relationship we needed to tune in for every week.

Since then, it’s very clear that Carol and Zosia are the unresolved relationship that will drive the character part of the story.

A question you might ask is, “Can I do what Gilligan did and wait until episode 2 to bring in my central unresolved relationship?” The answer is no. Gilligan can do this because Apple TV promised him 2 seasons. He doesn’t need to worry about winning over a reader with his first episode. Because of his success, he gets to think of his show as a whole rather than nailing episode 1.

You, on the other hand, need to write the perfect pilot. Which means setting up the plot of your show. And setting up at least one (but preferably multiple) unresolved relationships. For example, Succession sets up the intense, complicated relationship between Logan and Kendall immediately in that first episode. It’s just a better practice as a screenwriter. It’s actually lazy to kick that can down the road to episode 2. But Gilligan can get away with it cause of his success.

What I also like about this show is that it poses a lot of weird questions that you can’t get from any other TV show, past or present. Carol is attracted to Zosia. But Zosia is the culmination of 8 billion other people. So, if Carol were to, say, kiss Zosia, she’s kissing everyone.

So, you’re thinking, “How is that going to work?” It’s not exactly the simple situation that was Jim and Pam on The Office. So it’s like adding an atom bomb to a traditional TV writing practice, which I love.

The show is still clumsy. There’s no doubt about it. I’m not convinced you need to write a 10 minute record-and-playback sequence of Carol doing heroin to determine that heroin will make Zosia tell her the truth. Definitely a weird scene.

But every good TV show or movie has a little weirdness to it. There are imperfect things about it. As long as the core components of the story are in place, you can get away with a lot. And the core of Pluribus is working.

Don’t you agree?

Hep beats out the competition with his digital possession tale. The scene takes place in the aftermath of neuroscientist Richard’s successful simulated demonic possession.

Today’s breakdown includes a long scene. The art of writing long scenes has been lost. In our determination to edit and chop and condense every single aspect of storytelling, we’ve created a series of mini-scenes instead of good old fashioned long scenes.

The big benefit of writing long scenes is that they can be stories unto themselves. And you can tell those stories not unlike the story of your script. Just like a script has a beginning, a middle, and an end, a long scene has the requisite real estate to do that as well.

But here’s the real proof that we should be writing longer scenes: All my favorite scenes in movies are long. As I’m guessing yours are too.

So then why don’t we write long scenes these days? Simple. Because nobody knows how to do it anymore. It’s easy to write a 2 page scene because you don’t have to come up with much of a scene idea to write two pages of text. But a longer scene requires you to plan something out. And that’s harder.

With that in mind, let’s check out Hep’s winning scene for his Blood & Ink entry, Transcranial.

Download full scene here: Transcranial

In horror, the formula you want to go back to again and again when it comes to scene-writing is this: Imply that there is potential danger close by, and with every 30 seconds that passes, that danger should feel a little closer than it was before.

That’s what these first two pages are setting up. Daniel is the potential danger. We don’t know how bad it will be. But we know something isn’t right here, and that’s what motivates us to keep reading.

That’s the important part of the equation. If you don’t imply that the danger is close, then we don’t have as much of an incentive to keep reading. That’s why this setup is so powerful.

And when you do it right, it allows you to play around as a writer. It allows you to sit in the anticipation of what’s coming and make the reader earn it. “Moving on to the hard questions already. What’s 2+2? Now that’s a question for the ages. Do you want to know the right answer? The real answer?”

This is a response that can only work within this type of setup. If the same line is used between two friends catching up at a coffee shop, it’s white noise dialogue. It’s wasted script space. It’s unneeded. But here, because we sense that Daniel is not okay, a line like this almost comes off as a threat, which deepens our curiosity and makes us want to find out what happens next even more.

As Hep moves into this second set of pages, he has a choice to make. He can keep creating this sense of mystery, and slowly pull you deeper and deeper into the web of the scene. Or he can ramp things up and be more up front with his horror.

He chooses the latter. Daniel starts quoting lines from the Bible. There’s some fervor to the way he quotes the book, implying he’s passionate about the passage. There is no pretense anymore. At this point, we know he’s possessed. But Sarah doesn’t know that yet.

I personally feel that Hep jumped the gun here – he went too fast into “Daniel is possessed.” But, again, these are the creative choices that every writer must make. You’re never going to please everyone but you have to be okay with that. If you’re trying to please everyone, you’ll please no one. In other words, Hep doesn’t owe me the version of the scene I would’ve preferred.

Also, there’s a small mistake I want to note. This line: “Sarah cannot fully hide being slightly taken aback by Daniel’s response.” Avoid overuse of adverbs in general. But definitely avoid two of them in the same sentence. “Fully” and “Slightly.” I am guilty of this myself so I’m quick to recognize it. In many cases, adverbs cancel each other out. “Fully” means the opposite of “slightly.”

One of the things I’m very attuned to when I read a script is truth. Is the writer writing the truth of the situation (how it would actually go down if this were real life) or are they manipulating the truth because they prefer it for their story?

Here, I don’t feel that Hep is being truthful. This woman is in a room, alone, with a man, who’s acting weird, and who starts making sexual noises. You’re getting into some risky territory there. Someone (Sarah) could get hurt. So, the truth of this scenario is more likely to be Richard sending people in to protect Sarah. The safety of one’s employees is always the most important thing.

So, then, if you wanted to continue this scene as is, how would you address that issue? Well, it would be easy. You’d make it so that Richard wants to shut down the interview but Sarah is the one insisting that they keep going. She’s the one who wants to get to the bottom of what Daniel is going through.

With that said, I haven’t read the whole script. We do get a line from Richard here, where he lies to Sarah, which implies that he’s snakey. If that’s set up appropriately before this scene – that he will sacrifice anything for this experiment – then I might change my tune. But it did feel false in the moment, as I was reading it.

On the plus side, Hep is doing what I said these scenes should do. Which is, with each passing 30 seconds, the situation has become more dangerous than it was before. Daniel may be able to read minds now.

That’s how good scenes operate. They keep BUILDING. Where long scenes die is when they either stay stagnant or they recede. But here, so far, things are getting more dangerous by the minute. The scene is BUILDING. I’m going to say this again because it’s important. It is very hard for readers to stop reading if a scene is building towards something.

Another strong choice that Hep made here was to add a third entity to the scene – Richard and James in the control room. Most of these types of scenes play out with one person talking to another. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Clarice and Hannibal Lecter turned that type of scene into an art.

But having a third entity there creates a more complex dynamic that makes the scene less predictable. That’s important because a big reason why scenes become boring to readers is that the reader’s seen them before. So anything you can use to throw off the traditional rhythm can take an average scene and elevate it to a higher level.

The best thing to come out of these last two pages is Sarah going off-book. She ditches the plan and starts asking her own questions. I LOVE when characters go away from the plan because, again, it creates uncertainty. We live in a collective media that is way too predictable. It’s the same setups. The same motivations. The same words. It’s your job, as a writer, to find those less certain avenues in a scene and exploit them.

My only problem with this move by Sarah is that she didn’t get enough time to explore her off-book curiosity. I wish she had time to cook before James and Richard came in.

When it comes to the moments where the possessed try and psychologically manipulate those attempting to stop it, that dialogue tells you a lot about if the writer is up to the challenge of writing a possession script.

What I usually read is a lot of “generic evilness” from the possessed. “Do you remember, Jane, when you didn’t stop Darla from cutting her wrists?” This dialogue needs to be original, it’s need to be thoughtful, it needs to be specific, and it needs to cut in a way that takes the reader’s breath away.

Daniel’s final takedowns were a mixed bag. Sarah, you think about killing yourself. That’s weak-sauce. It’s lazy. It’s not specific enough. It feels like a filler line for someone who is supposed to be true evil embodied.

The takedown of Richard was much better. It was more specific. And it truly was cutting. To tell someone that they were happy that their infant child died and be right about it is going to take the breath away from some audience members. So that was good.

But you do have to be aware of the fact that the demon-possession sandbox requires you to recruit the most evil thoughts within you. Cause PG-13 possession dialogue doesn’t cut it.

Overall, I thought the scene was pretty good. I do have an idea I wanted to throw at Hep for the rewrite. The only thing that nagged me was the lack of a true goal in this scene. The approach to this interview was loosey-goosey. It was very, “Err, let’s see what happens when we talk to him.”

I would prefer a little bit more form. So, what if they’re trying to find out something specific from him? That’s the goal of the interview. But they can’t just ask the question right away. They have to work their way up to it. Make sure he’s comfortable first. So that’s the plan.

Also, they should know that, sometimes, after these intense experiences, there is a possibility of random anger or violence in the subject. So they should either arm Sarah with a syringe with a sedative in it. And if Daniel gets too riled up, she’s supposed to inject him with it to knock him out. Or, they can have an IV prepped and connected right to his arm and Richard has the power to press a button and the sedative will be injected directly into his blood and he’ll pass out.

This gives this scene more form — since there’s a plan in place. And it gives you more to play with. Clearly, what we’re going to do, is have them inject Daniel towards the end of the scene and become shocked when it has no effect on him at all. And Richard can keep pumping more and more of the sedative in him. But it’s not affecting him.

And maybe that even ends up killing him later. Or putting him in a coma. And now Richard is in some deep shit from the medical board.

It was fun breaking down something from Hep finally. Good job, buddy. What did the rest of you think? Gimme the good and bad of this scene.

The Scriptshadow community demanded a review of this script. So it’s time to give them what they want!

Genre: Thriller
Premise: After stealing a traumatized war-dog from the army, a washed-up veteran battles a relentless posse through an inhospitable mountain range to give her a new life in the wilds.
About: This script won the Grand Prize of the Page Awards! Bjack, the writer, has been a loyal reader and commenter at Scriptshadow forever. He’s had one review before which you can check out here.
Writer: Jack Azadi
Details: 103 pages

I believe this has been submitted to several Scriptshadow showdowns, as well as my contests, but has never been chosen. Why? I’ve been pretty vocal that the concept isn’t my cup of tea.

But hey, one of the coolest things a screenwriter can accomplish is to put a script in front of a doubter and win them over. It doesn’t happen often. But when it does, it’s sweeter than whipped cream on pumpkin pie.

Heck, it looks like it’s going to happen at the box office soon. I thought the Project Hail Mary book completely imploded when its secret reveal arrived. But after seeing the latest trailer, I’m now thinking it could be great.

I hope Mal is great too.

Let’s find out if it is.

Sergeant Dean Black-Feather was a soldier in Afghanistan. He was part of a K-9 unit with a dog named Mal. When we meet them, he sends Mal into a cave to get info on Taliban soldiers inside. His superior makes an order that puts the dog in danger. The dog gets attacked by the Taliban but survives.

Nine months later, Dean is back in the US, drinking all the time and getting in enough trouble that he occasionally ends up in jail. After he’s out, he gets word that Mal is back in the US and at a nearby base. He’s been having some intense behavioral problems.

When Dean gets there and reconnects with Mal, they give him the bad news. They have to put Mal down cause he bit off a serviceman’s fingers. Dean is not going to let that happen so he sneaks the dog off the base. He’s immediately chased by Lt. Ashley Miles, a reckless soldier who has a lot of pent up anger for not yet getting to see real action. Ashley is given the order to kill the dog on sight.

Ashley visits Sheriff Bill Gatewood to get some intel on Dean. Gatewood decides that he and Deputy Cole are going to join Ashley to corner Dean at his house. The problem is, Dean’s already getting the hell out of here. He takes Mal and heads into the woods. They follow him.

What follows is a cat and mouse game as Dean heads deeper and deeper into the forest, all the way up to the nearby mountains. He and Mal encounter some hunters and Mal viciously attacks them. Then he viciously attacks Dean! That’s when Dean realizes Mal really is sick. But he still picks Mal over these army assholes following him.

And it *is* assholes now, as the army volunteers a freaking attack helicopter to help out. Somehow, Dean and Mal defeat that thing, and head even deeper into the woods. At this point, Ashley realizes that if they don’t catch up and kill Mal soon, the two of them may be gone forever. So Ashley ups her game and prepares for a final showdown with Dean and the dog.

Okay, let’s get into what I liked.

I liked how easy the script was to read. I liked how quickly my eyes moved down the page. Not just that but, even as my eyes raced down the page, I could always retain the information I was reading. That’s a skill. Not every writer who writes in a minimalist style can do that.

I liked the type of dog at the center of the story. I’ve read a lot of dog scripts but not any about a war dog. That immediately makes the story stand out in the K-9 space.

I also liked the clever manner in which Jack explored PTSD. We’ve seen an endless number of movies about returning soldiers with PTSD. And so, at this point, it’s just noise. By shifting that PTSD over to a dog, it gives the disease new life and a fresh way to discuss it.

And finally, I can see this doing REALLY WELL with conservative audiences. If I were Jack, I would do everything in my power to get this in front of Angel Studios. It seems like the kind of thing they would love.

Okay, now… did I personally like this script?

I would probably answer that with a soft “no.” And let me explain why. I was reading through the script and, like I said, it was moving fast. There was always something happening. But something kept nagging me. There was an aspect to the story that wasn’t working and I couldn’t figure out what it was.

Then it hit me.

The concept was shaky.

I don’t care how you spin it. The army sending someone out to kill a dog at all costs just because it was prone to violent outbursts. I mean… I just didn’t believe that. At one point, there are 8 different people trying to kill this dog. Some of them are even trying to kill Dean!

And I’m sitting there thinking, “It’s a dog.” “Why do you care so much??”

It’s not like the dog had a jump drive taped to its collar with the Epstein files on it. So, no matter what happened, I kept going back to that. I mean there’s a Rambo level helicopter attack in this. And I kept thinking, “It’s a dog!” I couldn’t wrap my head around any logical reason why so many resources were being used to take down a dog whose crime was that he gets angry sometimes. Under that logic, the army should be hunting down 1 million dogs across America.

The other big issue was that Jack used a retroactive motivation. And retroactive motivations rarely work. I can think of a few. Shawshank Redemption comes to mind. But, in Mal, we spend the whole movie racing through these mountainous forests and I never knew why!

Already, I’m not buying the army’s motivation. Now you’re adding a main character without a motivation. Where are we going? Why are we going there? We don’t know. Until after the fact. We finally learn that we’ve arrived in reservation land where the army can’t chase the dog anymore.

Retroactive motivation doesn’t mean we all of a sudden feel motivation for the previous 90 minutes. We still participated in that 90 minutes, clueless as to why our hero was going where he was going. And that’s a big deal. Cause it frustrated me when I was reading it. I kept thinking, “Is he just going into the forest for the next 10 years to live with his dog like a hermit?”

By the way, neither of these things made this a bad script. The things about the script that were working helped offset a portion of these problems. But, in the end, the problems were bigger than what worked (in my personal reading experience).

As for the characters, I didn’t feel like I knew Dean well. I knew he loved Mal. I knew he was a drunk. But that’s about it. So he felt thin. Meanwhile, Ashley was way overcooked. It never made sense to me why she was so determined to kill this dog other than that’s what the plot needed.

If I were Jack, I would change Ashley into a man, into someone who was way more physically threatening, and someone who was a full on psychopath. Not in the Hollywood sense. But in the way he feels no emotion whatsoever. He’s REALLY heartless and scary. I can tell you for certain that I would’ve been a lot more into this script with him as a villain. Ashley felt like a gnat on coke. She was going to eventually find you. But you could handle her with a fly-swatter.

Finally, the ending. The ending is sad. And if I’m going to invest 90 minutes into this, I don’t want to be sad if I don’t have to be. Dean and Mal need to end up together or this movie doesn’t work. Period end of story.

Despite this critique, I can totally see why this did well in the contest. The writing is of a higher quality than 95% of contest entries out there. And I’m guessing that the PTSD commentary through the dog is what put it over the top. It gave it that extra pop that likely inspired the judges to anoint it over the others.

So I congratulate Jack. Regardless of my meanie analysis, I’m happy that he’s getting attention for Mal and hope he continues to do so. :)

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

What I learned: Definitely avoid retroactive motivation if possible. The whole point of motivation is to tell the audience why what we’re doing is so important. If you don’t tell them that, they’re always a little confused about why things are happening.

What I learned 2: If I don’t fear the bad guy, I don’t feel a whole lot of tension during the story. And I never feared Ashley for a second. That’s why I think she should be changed into someone a lot more formidable.

Was today’s script written by Taylor Sheridan or Bill Nye The Science Guy?

Genre: Drama
Premise: A billionaire hires a failed astronaut to help him build a ship that will get humanity back to the moon.
About: This is the script straw that, supposedly, broke the camel’s back. That camel being Taylor Sheridan. A couple of weeks ago, the shocking story broke that Sheridan was fleeing his home base, Paramount, and going over to NBC Universal. That deal is somewhere near the 1 billion dollar range. Although there were several reasons cited for Sheridan jumping ship, the Capture The Flag situation is the one that was said got Sheridan riled up. When David Ellison bought the company, he brought in two women as his primary film executives. And one of their first acts was to read this script and send Taylor Sheridan a bunch of notes on it. That ticked him off and he left. Today, we find out if those executives were right.
Writer: Taylor Sheridan
Details: 104 pages

When it comes to screenwriting, there is one decision that is more important than any other.

You guys all know it because you read my site. But it’s nice to be reminded every once in a while. By the way, that’s one of the great things about reading screenplays. You’re constantly being reminded of what works and what doesn’t.

So, what is that decision?

It’s the concept. It’s the concept. It’s the concept.

Without a good concept, you really are up shit creek without a paddle. And the screenwriting shit creek is particularly shitty. It’s not calm. It’s high blustery waves that are coming at you every second. So, without that concept, you’re going to get covered in excrement really fast.

Now, we always talk about concepts in the context of originality and impact. Ideally, you want that big splashy high concept idea that gets people excited.

But what I don’t often talk about is that, even if you don’t have a big splashy concept, you still need a concept that CREATES A STRONG STORY IDEA.

And today’s script is an example of what you get when you don’t have that.

When we meet Jerod Ramsey, he is taking a plane full of civilians up into low-orbit space, the first person to ever achieve the feat. However, Jerod isn’t happy with the result. It only lasts a minute and it doesn’t move the needle of his legacy. He needs something bigger!

While touring JPL headquarters a couple of days later, Jerod sees this really wild two-rowed rocket with 20 separate engines. He says, “WHO MADE THAT!??” And they tell him Randy did. Randy was an astronaut who never made it into space who is now a propulsion specialist. That night, Jerod makes the case to Randy why he should quit and come work for him.

Jerod is determined to get to the moon. Something we… have already done. But I guess everybody in the space world is really excited about doing it again! Except that there’s no money in going to the moon. So Jerod and Randy have to figure out a way to do it cheaper. And Randy’s weirdo two-row 20-engine rocket is what’s going to get them there.

If that sounds boring, don’t worry. Cause they’re also trying to win a contest against other people trying to do the same thing! Oh wait. That sounds boring also. What follows is a whole lotta science! As Randy attempts to use a lot of engineering to achieve something that we already achieved… 55 years ago.

That can’t be it, right? There’s got to be something that ups the ante. Don’t worry, I got you. Jerod gives Randy… A DEADLINE! Yup. That’s the big plot development in the script. Jerod makes Randy work a lot faster than he’s used to. And that gives Randy a lot of anxiety! Meanwhile, Jerod just doesn’t want to die as an unknown rich dude. He wants to leave a legacy behind. So he needs his man Randy to succeed. Will they figure it out? I am not on the edge of my seat hoping to find out.

The big issue with Capture The Flag is that the concept doesn’t have any stakes attached to it. It has a goal! Complete this ship. But there are zero stakes. We’ve already been to space. We’ve already been to the moon. So, if you’re setting a movie in 2025 where the main goal is to get into space and get to the moon, you’re not going to have a whole lot of people interested in what happens next.

Your screenplay’s dead right there. That’s it.

There’s nothing you can do to fix it.

Which is what baffled me so much about this screenplay. I know that Taylor Sheridan understands the importance of stakes. So I spent the majority of this reading experience trying to figure out what it was about this story that made him want to tell it.

My best guess is that a) it’s a very sort of ‘Go America’ type story, which I know he values. It’s about American ingenuity and the race to do something important. And then, I’m guessing that Sheridan has this secret science-nerd part of him that he’s finally letting out. Because a lot of this script is trying to solve complex engineering problems. Maybe Sheridan was inspired by Andy Weir’s The Martian.

If you fail the concept test, is there any shot at your script being good?

Let me answer that with a Scriptshadow tennis analogy.

When I was still competing, I rolled my ankle BADLY in a match. I’ve never felt that much pain before. The next match, I tried to play. I could move pretty well to my right, the direction that didn’t require me to push off the bad ankle. And I could swing fine. I could still serve pretty well. But could I play as competitively as I could before that? No. Not even close. And I lost badly.

Going into a script with a weak concept is like going into a match with a bad ankle. It just makes everything harder.

I don’t know if any of you have been watching The Beast In Me, the new Netflix show, but the main character, Aggie, is a writer. The show is about a rich guy named Nile Jarvis, who’s just moved in next door to Aggie. Nile was recently accused of murdering his wife, who went missing.

Aggie has been stuck on her new book forever. The book is about the friendship between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. One day Nile, who she becomes a sort of “frenemy” with, asks her what she’s working on and she tells him about the book. He mimes snoring and says, “That sounds like the most boring book in the world.” She’s, of course, taken aback. And then he says, “You should write about me instead.”  So, she does.

This is the perfect example of an idea that’s DOA versus an idea that’s exciting.  Friendship between two people on the Supreme Court?  Borrrrrrring.  A look into the mind of a potential killer where you maybe get a confession?  Exciting!

I don’t even know what to say about the specific story of Capture The Flag other than it’s boring as hell! Maybe even more so than a book about Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. It’s just endless repetitive scenes about engineering breakthroughs on this rocket-spaceship thing they’re trying to build. All very scientifically discussed.

Taylor, buddy, you’re not going to want to hear what I say next. And this comes from someone who’s given a positive review to literally every single thing I’ve read of yours.

But this one? Those female executives were right on the money. I don’t know how you read this script and not have a billion notes for the writer. There’s one exchange near the end of the script that I believe encapsulates everything that’s wrong with the idea. Jerod says: “The one thing that can change that is putting the Magellan on the moon. Help me do that. Help me do that by living out your dream.” Randy stands from the table, walks a distance off. Looks at the sky. Randy: “If you want me to finish it, you have to give it back to NASA.” Jerod: “They’ll never pay the license fee —”

Look, the reason they had so many notes is that the concept doesn’t work. If the concept doesn’t work, EVERY ASPECT OF THE SCRIPT ISN’T GOING TO WORK. So, you’re going to have a million notes. And you’re going to have characters talking about freaking LICENSING FEES during the climax. No script’s climax should ever EVER involve LICENSING FEES!!!!! The reality is, there’s only one true note. That note is: Come up with a better concept. Then all these notes go away.

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

What I learned 1: Stay in your lane. Taylor Sheridan is EXTREMELY GOOD at writing about Americana. This script shows what happens when you move out of your lane. If you’re an aspiring writer, I would recommend doing what Taylor Sheridan did, which is to keep writing in the same genre until you master it.

What I learned 2: Fictional stories that are written like they’re based on real life stories never work.

In a shocking upset, Now You See Me defeated The Running Man, which only pulled in 17 million dollars for the weekend.

See, this is why I don’t like it when Hollywood shoves someone in our faces. It isn’t organic. It doesn’t feel genuine. And when you shove someone in front of our eyes and you say, “You must now accept this person as a movie star,” we’re going to push back. Being a movie star is literally the hardest thing to achieve in existence. It must be earned. And Glen Powell hasn’t earned it.

Also, these aspiring movie stars don’t have any clue how to become a movie star anymore. The way it’s done is that you find the genre that audiences love you in and you make a bunch of movies in that genre, with slight variations here and there. THEN, about 5-7 years into your career, you branch out and try more challenging material, like weird indie films and such. And the great thing is, if you suck at that, you’ve already established a lane that people love you in, so you can go back to it.

But these new impatient Millennial and Gen-X wannabe movie stars try to be everything right away and confuse the hell out of audiences. Glen Powell breaks out in a romantic comedy. Then he does a weird TV comedy. Now he’s doing this action film. He hasn’t established himself enough for us to give him that leniency.

Does the 1-2 failed punch of Chad Powers and Running Man mean the end of Glen Powell’s career before it even started? No. He’s got one more shot. Ghostwriter, which is going to be JJ Abrams big return to directing, has him as a sci-fi novelist whose sci-fi worlds start coming to life. If that bombs, then yes, it’s over. He’s Eric Bana.

Glen Powell would also benefit from some media training. He comes off as way too rehearsed and he doesn’t seem to show any genuine parts of himself at all. I wish you luck Glenny boy.

But what I would really like to talk you about today is the third episode of Pluribus. You guys know I can’t stop talking about the importance of the third episode of a TV series and how it is the single most accurate indicator of whether a show is going to succeed or not.

Because what the third episode tells you is whether you really have a TV show. The first episode is a mini-movie that sets up the concept and asks a few questions. The second episode is a natural extension of the fallout from the first episode, usually initiated by the cliffhanger from episode 1.

But two major shifts happen in the third episode. One, you shift to a different writer. The creator writes the first two episodes. The number 1 staff writer writes episode 3. So you’re going to your bench, and the bench’s performance is the real determinant of whether your show is going to be good. Cause the bench will be writing the majority of your show.

And then the other shift is that episode 3 is the first episode that the writer hasn’t meticulously planned yet. They know exactly what episode 1 is going to look like. They’ve beat out 90% of episode 2. But no creators ever think about episode 3 ahead of time other than in abstract terms.

But more than anything else, episode 3 is the first episode where you’re settling into the long walk that is a TV show. What are your week-to-week episodes going to look like? Episode 3 gives us our first peek at that. And if you don’t have a show that can generate consistently strong plot and character beats, we’re going to start seeing it here.

Which, unfortunately, is something I noticed right away in the third episode of Pluribus. By the way, why am I so focused on Pluribus? Because it’s the first show since Severance that has the potential to be a smart entertaining science-fiction show. These are rare. So, when they come around, I grab my praying emoji hands and I blanket my screen with them.

The third episode of Pluribus starts with a literal cold open flashback of Carol and her girlfriend (who died in episode 1) taking a vacation at an ice hotel. After that, we have Carol flying back from Europe after meeting the six other English-speaking people on earth who haven’t been affected by the virus. That meeting was a disaster so now Carol is going home.

While on the plane, she decides, of the five non-English-speaking people remaining, one is worth giving a shot to. So she calls him several times but he keeps hanging up on her, presumably because he thinks she might be one of the “collective.”

So Carol goes home to New Mexico, and sits at home watching TV when she hears a car outside. She heads out, sees the car screech away, and sees that they left her a hot dinner. She calls her personal concierge (who’s been modeled to look like Carol’s dream woman in the hopes of making Carol happy) and tells her she doesn’t want them giving her food.

The next day, she goes to her fancy healthy grocery store, Sprouts, only to find that there’s no food in it anymore. The concierge informs her that the world has consolidated all of the food to make it easier to get to people. Carol bitches at her and says she wants her Sprouts by the end of the week. She hangs up and, within a couple of minutes hears trucks approaching. She then watches as a dozen semi trucks and a hundred people quickly restock the entire Sprouts. Carol has her grocery store back.

She goes back home and on one of her many frustrated phone calls with the collective, sarcastically mentions she wishes she had a grenade. A couple of minutes later, her concierge shows up with a grenade. Carol and the concierge then get in a fight, Carol accidentally pulls the pin from the grenade, the concierge freaks out, grabs it and throws it out the window, but becomes injured in the subsequent explosion.

Carol then rushes the concierge to the hospital. While she’s being tended to, another collective member checks in on Carol and their conversation segues back to the fact that they idiotically gave her a live grenade. This prompts Carol to ask them what they won’t give her.  A bazooka? Yes, they’d give it to her. A tank? Yes, they’d give it to her. A nuclear bomb? They hesitate a little on this one but… yes, they would ultimately give it to her. And that’s it. That’s the end of the episode.

I went into detail on all the major moments from the episode here for a reason. I want you to understand why the third episode doesn’t work as well as the first two, and why it’s such a bad omen for the remainder of the show.

Before we do that, however, I want to establish why the first two episodes worked. In the first episode, we have a clear storyline. The shit hits the fan and our main character has to deal with it. It’s a simple story structure and a very effective one. Remember, stories don’t have to be big and complex to be good. Quite the opposite. The best stories are often simple.

The second episode uses a goal set up from the first episode to drive its story. There are six English speaking people in the world other than Carol who have not gotten the virus. Naturally, Carol wants to meet them so they can figure out if there’s anything they can do to destroy the collective. So she flies to Europe to meet them.

What I want you to pay attention to here is how a strong goal with high stakes can give you a good episode of television. Because that’s what gives you a STORY. Someone trying to acheive an important goal and running into obstacles is a story. And it’s a very easy structure to build a 55 minute episode around.

The first thing you’ll notice about episode 3, is that unlike episodes 1 & 2, there is no overarching plotline propelling the episode forward. I knew the episode was in trouble the second the cold open started: a flashback to Carol on a vacation with her girlfriend.

What did this scene do to push the overall narrative forward? Nothing. It is dead time. The writers would argue that it’s giving us more information about our characters, which presumably, would make us care more for them. But that’s not true. It doesn’t tell us anything new about them at all. Never use a flashback if it tells us something we already know or that we could’ve already assumed.

Then we cut to the actual story part of the episode and, unlike the first two episodes, you’ll notice that no big goal emerges. Carol is on a plane bummed out that nobody else wants to try and save the world with her. Then, almost as an afterthought, she decides to get in touch with one of the non-collective individuals who wasn’t at the meeting.

Because this is something Carol decides to do on the spot, it has zero stakes attached to it. That’s a good screenwriting lesson you can take away right now. If a character is doing something they only thought of several minutes ago, the stakes of that action are going to be lower than ground level. We won’t care.

When Carol gets home, she’s got nothing to do! And this was the first moment where I really noticed that the screenwriting was in trouble. If we’re two hours into your 60 hour series and your main character doesn’t have anything to do, that’s a BAD OMEN.

It only gets worse from there. The big plot point that arrives next is… they deliver dinner to Carol? THAT’S your big plot point to jump-start the episode’s narrative?? Oof, that’s bad news. You’re trying to convince me to be entertained by Carol not wanting food? Something – by the way – that they’re already established in the previous episodes! So beyond it being a weak plot development on its own, it’s a redundant one too.

The high point of the episode is Carol going to the empty grocery store and the collective refilling the entire store for her. It’s a fun sequence, without a doubt. But it’s fool’s gold. It’s the kind of thing that, when you’re writing the episode and you’re worried that not enough is going on, you point to that sequence and say, “Yeah, but I have this great sequence here.”

A sequence in an episode that has no connection to any plot is not a good thing. If anything, it highlights that you don’t have a story running through your episode.

Then Carol goes home again. She watches TV again (more time where your hero has nothing to do!!! in only the third episode!!!). And then we introduce this grenade subplot. Carol gets in a fight with the concierge and the grenade goes off and the concierge is injured.

Let me just say that the concierge has already been injured TWICE in this show. So this is the third time. Beyond all the problems I’m listing here, you’re also repeating yourself. But even beyond that, I rolled my eyes when this happened because now Carol is taking her to the hospital. And that’s the kind of plot development you bust out when you’re running out of ideas. It literally felt like the writer was making up the story as he went along.

The most important point to take from all this is that THERE IS NO UNIFYING PLOT THREAD PUSHING THIS EPISODE ALONG. Notice how we’re just moving from random development to random development. That’s a major sign that an episode is poorly written.

You need one overarching plotline to push the episode along because, without that, you put your characters in this compromising position by which the only way to make the story dramatic is to come up with these little miniature inciting incidents that get your character reacting — like realizing she can call another of the 11 humans, like delivering her food, like giving her a grenade, like the concierge getting injured.

This was my whole worry after watching the pilot — that there wasn’t a clear path where extended plotlines could be built for the characters. With Pluribus failing the Scriptshadow Episode 3 test, it is now perilously close to imploding.

So, here’s what needs to happen for it to save itself. For one, NO MORE FLASHBACKS. If we see another flashback in episode 4, this series is done. Because it means they’re trying to fill up space. They don’t have enough plot so they need ANY SCENES THEY CAN FIND to get them to an acceptable running time.

But the main thing is they need to get back to using episodes as self-contained stories like they did the first and second episodes. This is why Gray’s Anatomy and CSI and The Good Wife can generate so many episodes so effortlessly. Because each episode generates a medical issue that needs solving, or a case that needs winning, or a murder that needs investigating.

You don’t have that luxury when you’ve written a serialized show. So it requires you to come up with that driving central force at the beginning of each episode. If you don’t, you run into the problem Pluribus ran into here. Without an overarching narrative, you’re writing a ‘grasping at straws’ narrative whether you like to or not. What little desperate plot beat can you think of now that will get you through another 8 pages?

It’s a simple solution, guys. Build a full story structure into every episode!

Did anybody see The Running Man or Pluribus Episode 3? If so, what did you think??