One of my favorite things in life is, after a long day of work, to watch a new movie. It used to be I’d go to Blockbuster. Then Redbox. Then Apple. Not it’s Amazon. Scroll through the choices, find something that looks good, press play, and turn off my brain. I honestly don’t think there’s anything that gives me more happiness.
But happy times have changed. I can’t remember the last time I found a movie I wanted to watch. Granted, there are extraneous circumstances going on here, seeing as we’re in a pandemic. But that’s only really affected the gigantic movies. Everything else is getting released. If you want to join me in a collective eyebrow raise, go to Amazon, Apple, or Netflix right now and look at what movies they’re promoting. Here are a few that I came across…
Are we even trying anymore?
There isn’t a single movie here that someone who isn’t obsessed with the specific subject matter would be interested in seeing. The concepts are so specialized and/or uncommercial that just looking at them sends me into a boredom coma. What happened to releasing movies that people were actually interested in?
If I’m not mistaken, one of the movies on this list has a title with a spice pun.
Let me repeat that. It puts a spice pun in its title.
Or this Malcom and Marie movie. In the past 30 years, there hasn’t been a single movie released in black and white that wasn’t more about the director than the audience. It is a purely egotistical move that is never about improving the viewer experience. And I love John David Washington. But you will sooner catch me getting a facial reconstruction consultation from Kylie Jenner’s doctor before I watch this film. If you want to make black and white films, enroll at USC. They’ll let you make all the black and white films you want. As a bonus, only your classmates will have to suffer through them.
Then there’s News of the World. Could there be a more boring looking poster in the past decade? If a bearded Tom Hanks standing next to a girl in a context-less Old West setting doesn’t put you to sleep, the title of the movie, which is so disconnected from the film’s promotional image as to make you wonder if they accidentally put the wrong title on the poster, will.
I hate complaining about this but I love movies. So when the industry that creates movies offers me nothing to watch, I’m upset. Especially because that industry is creating more movies than ever. Not to mention, it’s easier to watch movies than ever. So you’d think a few would turn out to be decent.
I mean did you see the big film to come out of Sundance this week? It’s called “Coda” and it’s about a hearing-impaired family that owns a fishing business. Who’s going to watch that movie outside of the 5000 people who work in the indie movie industry and 100 Rotten Tomato critics?? Nobody is.
Not that Sundance is known for churning out box office juggernauts. But it did give us Little Miss Sunshine. It did give us Hustle and Flow. It gave us Palm Springs. It gave us The Big Sick. It gave us Reservoir Dogs. Coda looks like it’s meant to show us pretty pictures of boats during sunset while characters cry about, I don’t know, not catching enough fish that day.
Even when the industry is releasing movies meant for bigger audiences, they’re screwing it up. Like The Little Things, which has a couple of great actors in it (Denzel Washington and Jared Leto). The serial killer genre has mass appeal when done well. So you’d think this one would have potential. But The Little Things may be the most average script ever written. The concept is fool’s gold. It seems like it should be interesting. Yet you’re bored to tears.
And, by the way. None of these movies are even any good. It’d be one thing if they were weak ideas but great films. But nobody’s talking about any of these movies. Nobody’s saying, “Oh man, you have to check out News of the World! Stop what you’re doing right now! Tom Hanks has a 15 page monologue about cowboy spurs that’s going to change how you approach your life!” The only praise these films are getting are from Rotten Tomatoes critics who can’t even be honest about what films they dislike anymore less they get yelled at on Twitter.
Believe it or not, there is a silver lining to all this.
When you deprive a market of anything for too long, the market will eventually correct itself. You are depriving people of fun movie ideas. You are telling them that the only products available are sad artsy non-commercial specialized faire. Guess what. It’s only a matter of time before they scream at you to give them something fun again.
Give us The Invisible Man. Give us The Shallows. Give us Sicario. Give us Knives Out. Give us Get Out. Give us John Wick. Give us The Martian. Give us Zombieland. Give us The Meg. Give us The Bourne Identity. If you want to play with more nuanced subject matter or character-driven material , frame it inside a story that people actually want to see. Like Arrival. Like The Revenant. Like Nightcrawler. Like Chef.
It’s for this reason that I think high concept ideas are about to make a comeback. People are bored. They want movies that are fun again. Which is all the more reason to enter the High Concept Showdown here at Scriptshadow. Let us, together, bring good movies back to the people!
The Endless Scrolling disease plaguing streaming services everywhere is going to have a long-term negative impact the likes of which we may never recover from unless we do something now. Don’t be complicit in the end of satisfied movie-watching experiences. You can find out more about the High Concept Showdown here.
Look, I just want good movies again. I just want to pull up Amazon and see a movie I want to rent. I mean, to give you an idea of how bad it’s gotten, I’m considering watching The Assistant tonight. Everything I’ve been told about that movie amounts to, “It’s good, but nothing happens.” You see what you’ve done to me, Hollywood? I’ve resorted to watching movies where I’ve been told, IN ADVANCE, that nothing happens. You can do better!
We’ll end this post with a ‘What I Learned.’ When you come up with a movie idea, imagine the poster. Now, this is the part where you have to be honest with yourself because the tip doesn’t work otherwise. When you imagine that poster, is that a movie you believe a lot of people would want to see? Or is it a movie that only YOU would want to see? If it’s a movie that only you would want to see, it’s probably not a good enough movie concept.
Where are the good movies, guys??? Tell me!
The deadline for High Concept Showdown is fast approaching. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a post where I explain. Basically, it’s a screenplay contest where I pick the five best-sounding concepts from your e-mail submissions and those five scripts compete against each other. Readers of the site vote for the best script, which then gets a review. I’m low-key hoping to find a great script to produce. Here are the deets:
Where: Entries should be sent to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
What: Include title, genre, logline, why you think your script deserves a shot, and a PDF of your script!
Entries Due: Thursday, March 4, 6:00pm Pacific Time
I’ve noticed a few of you point out you don’t think you’re going to finish your script in time for the showdown. I’m not buying that. You still have an entire month! It’s not the ideal amount of time to write a script but it’s certainly possible. Especially if you’ve already committed to an idea and started writing some pages.
So today I’m going to talk about how to write fast and STILL WRITE A QUALITY SCRIPT. Some of it is logistical. Some of it is psychological. All of it is hard work. Let’s jump into it.
SCHEDULING IS YOUR FRIEND
At 30 days, you are writing 3-4 pages a day, which comes to about 2 scenes a day. That’s not a lot of pages. Especially by screenwriting standards (try writing 4 pages of a novel – I guarantee you’ll never think writing 4 screenplay pages is hard again). Obviously, every writer is different. But all of you are capable of writing 1 page every 30 minutes. Which means we need 2 hours a day.
So the first thing I want you to do is schedule out two hours a day for the next month. Figure out what time works best for you. The more consistent the time of day, the better. But I understand schedules change over the course of the week. So figure out when, each day, you can block out two hours. Then do that for a month.
I can’t stress this enough. If you wake up every day and go by how you’re feeling, you’re not going to complete the challenge. There isn’t enough time. When you’ve got a deadline this tight, you have to schedule your writing ahead of time.
SEEK OUT INSPIRATION
One of the goals of writing is hitting those inspiration bumps. We’re all at our best, as writers, when we’re inspired. We often find inspiration WHILE writing. We’ll be plodding through the script, when, all of a sudden, WHAM! We get this cool idea. And that idea leads to another idea. And that leads to a way to correct that plot hole you’ve been stressing over. Before you know it, you’ve got a million great ideas running through your mind and you can’t stop writing. Which is great. Cause when you can’t stop writing, you can easily take down 10-20 pages in a single writing session.
For that reason, we’re going to factor inspiration into our schedule. When it happens, you keep writing. No matter what. I don’t care if your postmates delivery just canceled and you only have eight minutes before Five Guys stops taking orders. If your house is burning down. If someone just stole your car. If you become a victim of Immediate Deaf Syndrome. There are going to be days when you don’t get your four pages. So on the days when you’re inspired, you’ll be expected to make up those pages.
This shouldn’t be difficult because there’s no easier time to write than when you’re inspired. So go on that ride as long as it will take you. If it’s ten pages later, twenty pages later, thirty pages, I don’t care. Not even threat of divorce should stop you. If your significant other has had enough with your writing antics, give them my e-mail. I’ll be happy to explain to them what’s going on. I can’t promise you you’ll have a husband at the end of the day. But as we all know: writing > family. And family members need to understand that.
GUN TO THE HEAD
Judgement is one of your biggest enemies as a writer. If someone put a gun to our head, we could all write 100 pages in a day. Why would we be able to do that? Because with a gun to our head, we’re not asking if our protagonist, Willy, would realistically ask Deborah, the Home Depot cashier, out on a date. We’re writing to get to those 100 pages. Self-judgement no longer plays a role.
To write a script as fast as we’re writing one, you need to have a similar gun-to-the-head mindset. While I’m not going to say, “Write anything you come up with,” the only way you’re going to finish this script is if you exorcise the self-judgemental demon inside of you and send him on a vacation to Siberia for a month.
I know a lot of people are afraid of doing this because they think they’re just going to write a bunch of shit. But what you lose from careful deliberation, you will likely gain from inspiration. The more you’re writing, the better the chance that you hit that inspiration turbo boost. Those moments will offset some of the mediocre choices you made.
I’M GOING TO WRITE A STORY TODAY
Okay, Carson. You’ve told me how to write a script fast. But how do you make it good? Cause I don’t see how the two can mutually co-exist.
It’s true that time almost always improves a screenplay. The reason for that is you can analyze what isn’t working in your script and rewrite it with new, better ideas. And after you write that new draft, you can do it again. Figure out what’s wrong, make it better. Figure out what’s wrong, make it better. The more time we have, the more time we’ve got to keep writing better drafts.
However, there’s something about a short time frame that helps a writer focus. Not just on the entire script. But in each individual writing session.
When you’ve got 4 pages a day – which basically amounts to one or two scenes – you can laser-focus into writing the best scenes you can. A great way to do this is to treat every scene like it’s its own mini-movie. It has a beginning (often a character goal), a middle (the character struggles to achieve that goal), and an end (they either achieve or fail at their goal).
Yesterday’s TV Pilot, National Parks, did this well with its opening. Our “hero” had a goal – go arrest the person who broke into the car. They struggle – the squatter family refuses to tell her where the burglar is. It concludes – She tries to fight the family off but they ultimately kill her.
You can do that with EVERY SINGLE SCENE in your script. It’s hard. Especially when the scenes are short. But not every scene has to have a giant climax. You don’t have to kill off characters every five minutes. It could be as simple as trying to get the kids ready in time to go to school that morning.
The point is, you’ve established these bite-sized chunks of the script you’re going to work on every day. Let’s turn it into an advantage. Every day, tell a little story (or two stories) in those scenes. That way, when you get to the end, you not only have a big story. You have a series of scenes that are entertaining in their own right.
WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT GET DISCOURAGED
Last week, I went to play in a doubles tennis league. I hadn’t played doubles in a while but I had these designs of how the night was going to go. In particular, I was going to poach all night long (this is when you cross over and slam the ball down the other team’s throat).
Well, when we started playing, I realized my partner wasn’t hitting strong enough to give me easy poaching opportunities. All of a sudden, this version of what I had predicted was no longer possible. Instead of covering the whole court, I stood in place almost the entire night, frustratedly watching the two back-court players rally with each other. I became so frustrated that it started having an effect on the rest of my game. Soon I was missing returns that I usually make, netting serves that I never miss.
I’m telling you this because writing sessions are similar to this. You go in with these grand designs of how things are going to go. But, all of a sudden, you find yourself in some inert scene where your characters are exchanging polite boring dialogue, and by the end of the first hour, you’re not only convinced you’re a terrible writer, but that tomorrow you will be giving up screenwriting for good.
Eventually, while playing doubles that night, I accepted that whatever amazing version of myself I had envisioned, they wouldn’t be showing up. And that was okay. I shifted my mindset to playing each individual point as best as I could. And it worked. I started playing much better, salvaging what looked like a disastrous evening.
Accept that there will be plenty of writing nights where things don’t go as planned. That great scene you had in your head all day? Maybe it turns out awful. That character you’ve never had a good feel for? Maybe you’re even more confused about them by the end of the night. Don’t get discouraged. It’s all part of the challenge. Try something different. Or move on to the next scene. The next scene is always an opportunity to find inspiration. And once you hit that, you’ll forget about how bad the night started.
But if you let enough scenes get you down, you will eventually stop writing your script. And we can’t have that. We’re all human. We’re imperfect. We screw up. If you’re going to write a script in 30 days, you can’t be beating yourself up the whole time. You’ll eventually give up.
That’s all I gotta say. I’ve given you your blueprint for finishing before the deadline. Now get to it!
Genre: TV – 1 Hour Drama
Premise: The elite special agents of the Investigative Services Branch who are tasked with solving the most complex and heinous crimes committed within the diverse and majestic National Parks of the ISB’s Pacific West region.
About: Kevin Costner is expanding his Yellowstone empire. Not content with his hit show, Costner is doubling down for a more modern exploration of the national park world. This will be Costner’s first ever TV writing credit.
Writers: Aaron Helbing, Jon Baird, & Kevin Costner
Details: 63 pages
It’s a TV Wednesday. Time to get our TV on. As someone who’s spent his only TV time lately watching episodes of Storage Wars, I could use a good show. Let’s see if Costner delivers the In and Out Animal Style burger version of a TV show. I’ll take fries with that, thank you.
Off-Duty ISB (Investigative Services Branch for the National Parks Service) agent Erica Breen is checking out a complaint from a married couple who say a kid broke into their car and tried to steal from them.
Breen finds an old cabin in the Yellowstone National Park area that a family squats in. She heads up to ask if they know anything about this break-in and finds Adele, a white-trashy type, lingering about. As she begins questioning Adele, she spots kids eyeing her sinisterly. And then a few older kids. And then, behind her, a few older kids still. And then young adults. And then adult adults. They seem to be everywhere, lingering in all 360 degrees of the forest surrounding her. As Breen tries to stay calm, they eventually attack. And Breen suffers a horrible violent death.
Cut to a few days later and we meet the rest of the ISB crew, led by 30-something Lincoln Kane and 50-something Cal Foster. They’ve found the body of a dead woman in a lake and are trying to lift her out. While this is happening, they get word that Breen has been missing for a couple of days. Lincoln takes stock of this.
But for right now, the priority is the woman in the lake, and the team is highly suspicious the woman’s ex-husband might be involved. Meanwhile, we meet this nasty dude, Lee, who hikes out into the park with a couple of girls and then shoves them off a cliff to their deaths. It’s one more problem the ISB unit is going to have to deal with. But first, they find a trail camera that recorded Breen’s death. And after witnessing the horrible things the family did to their friend, they stop everything to find and take this family down.
National Parks has the kind of teaser all TV writers should study.
It’s a wonderfully suspenseful scene that follows this out-manned woman observing as more and more people begin appearing around her. The scene takes its sweet time, making us squirm just as much as the poor character. We’re hoping against all hope that she’s going to find a way out. And since I assumed the scene was setting up our heroine, I thought she would figure out a way. So color me shocked when she didn’t.
The reason I want you to study this scene is because I read too many weak TV teasers. Just the other night, I read a teaser where a guy talks to his wife on a phone call in his car. That was it. That was the opening scene of the show! Sure, the scene gave us some insight into the characters and their marriage. But it wasn’t dramatized. It was information. An opening scene without dramatization is like peanut butter and jelly without bread. How do you even get it into your body?
A good way to explore this challenge is by contrasting the first scene in National Parks to the second scene. The second scene is a group of people trying to fish a dead body out of a lake. Technically, there’s something going on here. We’ve got a dead body. We’re not sure who it is yet. You could argue that that mystery creates some drama.
But is it as good as the opening scene was? No. Not even close. The opening scene was turbo-dramatized. This scene had minor drama at best. It’s not like the body was wedged down under a rock in the water that was hard to get to and required scuba divers to go down and release it and then something goes wrong while they’re down there. It’s just logistically getting a body out of a lake.
That second scene is what most writers start their pilot with. Assuming you’re not so clueless that you’re writing that car conversation scene, this second scene, to most writers, feels like it’s sexy enough to start a pilot. I’m here to tell you it isn’t.
If you’re going to start with a dead body scene, it needs to have more going on than simply the logistics of getting a body out of some water. True Detective is a good example of dramatizing a “found body” scene. Here, something much weirder and more sinister took place. Seeing that death scene was uncomfortable. And trying to work out what the killer did and why they did it keeps the scene interesting.
Sorry to go so deep on that but the opening of any script, TV or feature, is so important. And it’s done the wrong way so often I feel it’s my duty to scream from the mountain tops – “THIS IS HOW TO DO IT THE RIGHT WAY!”
Once National Parks gets rolling, it encounters the typical Pilot challenges, namely that you’re introducing a lot of people in a very short amount of space and it becomes hard to remember who’s who. And in more severe cases, there are so many characters that it’s hard to know who the main one is. That’s an issue I had for a while here. I was halfway in when I realized Lincoln was the show’s main character.
I think the reason this happens so much in TV Pilot scripts is because most pilots are written to be made (as opposed to be sold). So they’re not as worried about readers not knowing who’s who. In their mind, that will be taken care of in the casting.
However, it’s good practice either way to make your characters different from one another. The more you can make them stand out on the page, the more distinct the characters will be on the screen. Unfortunately, I don’t know many people willing to go the extra mile to get this right. And National Parks suffers a little in that department.
But the pilot has enough going for it that I was into it until the end. Besides my desire to get justice for poor Erica Breen, it was fun to see the investigation for the second lake murder unravel. Overall, National Parks does it right. It finds a lane in the TV procedural that hasn’t been explored before then makes sure all its major plotlines could only exist in this unique environment. Worth the read!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I Learned: Not taking into account reader assumptions – Often times, we get so wrapped up in our stories that we start assuming the reader knows everything we do. Where this becomes a problem is during major scenes or important plot beats. If you overlook reader assumption, your reader could end up reading a completely different show than the one you intended. The opening scene of this pilot has a group of people killing ISB Special Agent Erica Breen. We then cut forward in time (we’re told it’s been a couple of days) and a bunch of ISB agents are pulling a dead woman (who they can’t yet identify) out of a lake. You tell me what the average reader is going to assume in this moment. 99% of them are assuming the dead body is Breen. One of the agents even gets a call that Agent Breen went missing a couple of days ago. However, it turns out this is a completely different woman and a completely different scenario that led to her death. It took me another four pages to understand that. And that’s something you don’t want the reader to misunderstand. I know it was obvious to the writers that these were two totally different women. But you showed us a woman getting murdered then cut to a dead woman in a lake. Under what circumstances would we NOT connect the two? You either have to rethink putting these scenes up against each other or be VERY CLEAR that two totally different things are going on.
Genre: Comedy/Satire
Premise: (from Black List) When Tabitha, a struggling foster kid, wins a contest to become part of the BIRDIES, a popular daily YouTube channel featuring the radiant and enigmatic Mama Bird and her diverse brood of adopted children, she soon learns that things get dark when the cameras turn off.
About: This one finished with 16 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer, Colin Bannon, has been working in the industry since 2008, when he was a Location Production Assistant for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull! He also wrote another Black List script, “First Ascent,” about a mountain climber who does a climb on a haunted mountain.
Writer: Colin Bannon
Details: 108 pages
Have you ever watched these family Youtube channels?
When I was at my brother’s place recently, my niece was obsessed with them. And while, on the one hand, they were fun, I couldn’t help but wonder what psychological effects the channel would have on the children. No matter how you spin it, it wasn’t healthy.
So I was expecting someone to write a script about this sooner or later. It’s too juicy of a topic not to and it’s a fresh take on the child star phenomenon, which is something that hasn’t had a fresh take in a while. Youtube (and social media in general) has created this new fertile plot of land for movie ideas, and today’s script might be the best commentary on that world I’ve seen yet.
Tabitha is a 13 year old orphan who lives in a miserable “Annie” type orphanage. Her only happiness comes form her favorite Youtube reality show, “The Birdies,” about a married couple who adopted a bunch of kids and now has one of the largest audiences on the service.
That’s changing, though. The family’s all-star daughter, Nightingale, has finally turned 18, which means she can legally leave the home and go off-grid, as far away from cameras as she can get. The good news for Tabitha is, this means they need to adopt someone new into the family! And that’s, like, Tabitha’s dream!
So Tabitha sneaks out to Best Buy to record an audition tape on one of the sample iPads. When the blue-shirted Best Buy employee spots what she’s doing, he charges forward to stop her. She rips the iPad off the security chain and goes running through the store while the video waits to upload. Just as she’s at 97%, the employees grab her and kill the upload. NOOOOOOOOOO.
After hours of crying, the other orphans tell Tabitha that her video went viral! Someone else in the store taped her. Which means – you guessed it – SHE GETS PICKED! The next day, Mama Bird (always dressed to the nines), Papa Bird (always holding a camera) and the other five children, all of them a perfect rainbow of diverse ethnicities, run to greet their new sister.
The next thing Tabitha knows, she’s IN THE BIRDIE MANSION, the home she’s been watching religiously every day for the past 8 years! And she has her own room. And she gets a brand new digital camera, iPad, iPhone, iwatch – everything an influencer needs. Yes, that’s right. Tabitha is now a content creator. And she’ll be expected, just like the rest of the family, to generate content for the daily show.
Tabitha then learns the truth about Mama Bird. When the cameras turn off at 8pm every day, so does big happy charismatic Mama Bird. She’s replaced by a cyclone of depression, of Youtube burnout. Of worry and fear and obsession. All Mama Bird has cared about for the last decade are subscribers and views. And both are plunging every day due to Nightingale leaving. What Tabitha doesn’t know is that Mama Bird is counting on her to save the channel. And for that, she will expect Tabitha to do many things she doesn’t want to do.
The first thing I want to point out about this is the clever setup, which is easy to miss since it’s subtle. Bannon is satirizing the “Youtube Family” genre by doing what any good writer would do. You take someone who doesn’t know that world and throw them into it. They then act as an avatar for us, as we ourselves don’t understand that world either. So when Tabitha is thrust into this family, we feel a connection with her and want her to succeed.
But Bannon faced an interesting problem in this setup. You can’t create a new 13 year old family member out of thin air. So how do get your heroine (Tabitha) into this family? The solution Bannon came up with was to make the entire family orphans. Now it makes sense why they would want to bring someone new into the family.
In addition to this, it adds more edge to the concept, since “adopting” isn’t that different from “casting.” You have to be a certain type of person (bubbly, charming, energetic) to make it into the family. From there, the level of love you receive is dependent on how many views you get.
Which is why this is such a clever idea. In the past, they explored similar concepts (child stars being worked like dogs) on TV shows. But in those shows, you *expected* the producers and executives to be assh*les. It came with the territory. But here, the producers are also the parents. So work and love are intertwined. Which is way more f*cked up for a child than simply needing to get ratings for your boss.
And Bannon understands this concept so well. I read a lot of scripts where the writer has come up with a good idea, but they don’t totally understand that idea, which results in a lot of non-specific scenes and characters that don’t leave an impression. It’s the difference between me making a cheeseburger and In and Out making a cheeseburger. In and Out eats, sleeps, and breathes cheeseburgers. They know that world so specifically that there’s nothing I could do to make a cheeseburger as delicious as theirs.
But let me give you a more specific example from the script itself.
There’s this great moment not long after the first act. Tabitha has just moved into the Birdie mansion, and after they finish taping for the day, Tabitha goes upstairs to see her bedroom for the first time. This is the first time in her life that she’s had her own room. So she breaks down. One of the other kids sees this and gives her a puzzled look. “The cameras are off,” the kid says. Tabitha looks back at him, quizzically. “You don’t have to cry. The cameras are off.”
It’s a perfect encapsulation of what these kids’ lives are. Every seemingly important moment requires a camera-worthy response. They’ve been trained to give that response when needed. If someone’s emoting without a camera taping it, that doesn’t make any sense to them at all.
Also, this script is another point for the power of simplicity – in this case, the power of a simple theme. A writer recently sent me the theme of their movie and it was like 8 sentences long and I chuckled and said, “This isn’t a theme. This is a thesis statement.” Big chunky long themes are not only unhelpful, they can actually hurt your script. The more you’re trying to manipulate the story so that it connects with every component of your giant unwieldy theme, the more confused the reader’s going to be.
The theme here is: The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.
The theme is powerful not only because of how simple it is, but because every person on the planet understands it. Simple almost always means ‘powerful.’ That power comes from the theme sticking with us. Someone who watches this movie is definitely going to remember it whenever they’re thinking of quitting their work or leaving a relationship. Is the grass really going to be greener? Or does the other side of the hill have a Mama Bird waiting for us?
There’s only one part of the script I didn’t get. The midpoint shift has Mama Bird turning Tabitha into Nightingale (signified by giving Tabitha Nightingale’s old wig) to stop the views from plunging. I’m not sure why she would think this was a good idea. The viewers aren’t going to mistake Tabitha for Nightingale. Actually, they’re probably going to get mad. (“why is this girl pretending to be someone she isn’t?”). So I wasn’t gung-ho about that choice. But everything else here is spot on. I enjoyed the heck out of it. Good stuff!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The “Eventually Is Gonna Snap” Character. I recently spotted this character on the show about the finance industry, “Industry.” This one worker was so determined to make it at the firm that he never left work, never went home, never did anything social. You just KNEW he was going to crack. And he did, in a horrible way. Here, we get that character with Bustard, one of the “birdie kids” in the family. Bustard isn’t as quick-witted or charismatic as the other kids and is, therefore, constantly being reminded by Mama Bird to up his game. You can see him desperately trying to do better – going so far as to repeat the word “subscribers” out loud thousands of times so he can say it without his foreign accent. Eventually, Bustard cracks and becomes suicidal. Why do these characters work? It’s the car-crash principle. If there’s a car crash up ahead, you spend all that time inching forward in your car anticipating how bad it could be, and, of course, when you get there, you have to look. A “Eventually Is Gonna Snap” character ensures that the reader will keep reading because they have to stick around to see that character wreck.
Genre: TV – Period Drama (Pilot Episode)
Premise: Set in the competitive world of London’s mating season, when debutantes are presented at court.
About: This is Shonda Rhimes’s first big play on Netflix, and she didn’t come lightly. This looks like it cost a billion dollars to produce. Netflix opened up that pocketbook and didn’t close it. That approach seems to have paid off because, according to Netflix, Bridgerton is the most watched program on the streamer ever over its first month, tallying up 82 million household watches.
Writer: Chris Van Dusen (produced by Shonda Rhimes) (based on the novels by Julia Quinn)
Details: 60 minutes
The time has come.
I’ve received over 650 e-mails about it. Asking me when am I going to do a stinking review for the sumptuous Bridgerton? And by 650 e-mails I mean two e-mails. It’s taken Netflix by storm. It’s taken you all by storm. And pray-tell it has taken me by storm. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about Bridgerton. Although that’s mainly because it’s the first show pictured whenever I open up Netflix but that’s neither here nor there.
Now while the manner in which the following review is written would seem to indicate I didn’t give this show a chance, I promise you that is not true. I’m not going to swear on my life or anything to promise you that. And, truth be told, I’m probably lying. But, hey, I’m the first to admit that “Cinderella with sex” isn’t the worst pitch.
Join me now, as I attempt to make sense of… Bridgerton.
So there’s this woman. Her name is “Lady Whistledown.” She runs a gossip blog but it’s the olden times version of a gossip blog so it’s printed on a pamphlet. Nobody knows who Lady Whistledown is, which confuses me since there are probably 3 printing presses in the entire world at this point and since very few people would have access to such a device, you could figure out who Lady Whistledown was through process of elimination. Assuming there are 10 buildings total in each town, just hang outside the printing press building until you find a suspicious-looking 50-something lady with 500 blank pamphlets walk inside.
Anyway, Lady Whistledown is obsessed with our heroine, the porcelain-skinned doe-eyed Daphne Bridgerton. Daphne hops on Whistledown’s radar when she gets the attention of the Queen! You see, back then, the Queen would spend entire days having women march into her throne room so she could either give them a ‘nay’ or a ‘yay.’ Sort of like their version of America’s Got Talent. But there’s only one Simon Cowell. And it’s a woman. And this Simon Cowell woman gets creepy ecstatic when she sees Daphne, bestowing upon her a forehead kiss, which makes everyone else in the room whisper to each other loudly. Meaning ‘This is a big deal!’ I’m glad they showed that loud whispering because otherwise I would’ve had no idea that it was a big deal.
ALLLLLL the men are now obsessed with Daphne and want her to husband them. It’s a little confusing, though, because Daphne is beautiful and the Bridgerton family already had a good name before this so it seems like she would’ve done well in the husband market anyway. But I guess this is like the difference between having access to regular dudes and celebrity dudes. Zak the scruffy-suited school teacher versus Zak Efron.
Either way, it seems like Daphne’s got it made. But there’s a big bad obstacle standing in her way. Her impossible brother, the Duke of Ellington! Actually, he’s not the Duke of Ellington but every guy in this show looks like a Duke of Ellington. So whenever I didn’t know someone’s name I mentally named them the Duke of Ellington. Point being, no husband is good enough for her brother. Which is cramping Daphne’s wedding plans.
Oh! I almost forgot to tell you. There’s this really studly guy that Daphne is attracted to named Simon Basset. But guess what? SIMON DOESN’T WANT TO GET MARRIED! Yikes, what?? Yeah. And he’s the only guy Daphne’s truly interested in. Well, until Lady Whistledown reveals that Simon is a player. And then she’s all, “You and I ain’t happening.” Which Simon seems totally unaffected by.
What is going to happen next? Will Daphne find a man? Will her nosy brother keep standing in her way? Will the true identity of Lady Whistledown ever be revealed???? I ask you, dear Scriptshadow reader, to find out the answers to these questions. For I know I never will.
Okay.
Time to get serious.
Although that’s probably not going to last.
What is Bridgerton? I don’t think it’s a soap opera. It’s too expensive to be a soap opera. So is it an elevated soap opera? A soap opera +1? Cause the whole time I was watching it, I was trying to figure out what the tone was. Is it supposed to be cheesy? If so, how cheesy? Or does it want to be taken seriously? Because sometimes it feels like it’s ready to take on real life problems and shit.
Since I could never get a handle on it, I could never get myself in the right headspace to care about what was going on. Take Cobra Kai, for example. Cobra Kai is cheesy 80s nostalgia. It’s not meant to be taken seriously. When there’s a serious moment, it’s almost always played with a wink to the audience. And whenever a problem does occur, it almost always gets resolved by karate. I understand that about Cobra Kai which is exactly why I love it. I never found that clarity while watching Bridgerton.
I did learn one thing about screenwriting while watching this show, though.
High stakes only need be high relative to the story you’re telling. For example, Ferris Bueller doesn’t have end-of-the-world-stakes. But there’s a good chance that, if Ferris gets caught ditching school today, he will have to repeat his senior year of high school. And to a high school kid, that’s a big deal.
This rule is on full display in Bridgerton. The stakes are: Daphne needs to find a husband. Back then, it was really important to find a husband. And the “bigger” the whale you caught, so to speak, the better it was for you and your family. The show does a good job establishing that, so those who enjoy this sort of show are likely invested.
There are typically two things required when talking about audience investment – stakes and character. If you’re ever losing audience investment (someone’s getting bored) it usually comes down to one of those two things. We’re talking about the stakes here. If the stakes don’t feel big to the reader, why would they stay invested? Let’s say, in Bridgerton, there’s no marriage storyline. It’s just people hanging out in the city and reading gossip pamphlets. You’re probably losing a lot of audience members. That’s because you don’t have stakes.
If you have stakes and your audience is still getting bored, it’s probably because, at least, 2 of your 3 main characters are weak. You can give me the highest stakes in the world – an asteroid is going to collide with earth with 100 Decepticons on it – but if 2 out of your 3 main characters are thin or cliche or they don’t have any sort of internal unresolved dilemma going on – I’m not going to be invested.
While Bridgerton clearly isn’t my thing, I can confirm that it got those two things right. It got the relative stakes down. And both Simon and Daphne are interesting main characters. Oh, and let’s not forget Lady Whistledown. Even though we never see her face, she’s still one of the most fascinating characters I’ve ever come across (I’m being sarcastic in case you couldn’t tell).
If you’re someone who likes period dramas, I’m guessing you’ll like this. The production value is insane. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much detail and extravagance in costume and set design in a period drama TV show… ever. And with two well-cast leads, it does the job.
Does that mean I’m going to watch it again? Hell no. I would shoot my own face with a staple gun before such an act were to occur. But I understand why the show has fans.
Maybe not 82 million fans.
But I understand why people watch it.
Sorta.
Not really, though.
But I kinda do.
I reserve the right to change my opinion on that in the coming days.
In which case I’ll probably say I hated it.
Lady Whistledown.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the best screenwriting skills you can possess is being able to identify why something works even if you don’t personally like it. It’s easy to dismiss something you don’t like as “bad.” But if other people like it, it doesn’t do you any good to assume everyone who liked it is an idiot with terrible taste. It’s much smarter to figure out what they’re responding to. You might be surprised and find a new screenwriting skill you can now place in your own screenplays moving forward.
