Genre: TV Pilot – 1 Hour Drama
Premise: During the Black Plague, a group of rich Italians head off into the countryside to party out the plague in a beautiful villa.
About: Word on the street is that Bridgerton was so big for Netflix that they wanted more period stuff. Enter Jenji Kohan, creator of Netflix’s famed, “Orange is the New Black.” Let’s just say that Jenji’s version of “fun” is obviously a lot more complex than everybody else’s version of “fun.” Although Jenji is the producer, the creator of the show is Kathleen Jordan, who wrote Teenage Bounty Hunters.
Writer: Kathleen Jordan
Details: 61 pages

Tony Hale will be playing the hapless Panfilo

I’m reviewing today’s pilot to remind everyone that Pilot Showdown is coming up!!! Send in your pilot logline along with your title and genre. The best 5 pilot loglines will compete against each other with you, the readers of the site, voting for the best. Whoever wins will get their pilot reviewed the following Friday. There’s obviously an appetite for this because I’ve been getting a lot of pilot loglines sent in. It’s going to be a dandy.

What: TV Pilot Logline Showdown
When: July 21st
Deadline: Thursday, July 20th, 10pm Pacific Time
What: send your title, genre, and logline
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

As the world attempted to decipher why brooding Timothy Chalamant was cast in the role of one of the most charismatic characters in history, I reminisced about when Orange is the New Black first hit Netflix. Along with House of Cards, it felt like a new era in television had emerged, rivaling when Jackie Gleason first appeared on TV.

If you remember, this was the first time in history that an entire season of television shows was offered at once.

It was a strange decision that streamers have, since, backtracked on, at least for their larger shows, as it practically begs people to sign up for a month, binge the new show, then ghost the service.

The practice also inadvertently birthed a new storytelling format – the “movie” TV show. Narratives were now being designed like films, to build over an entire season, as opposed to ebbing and flowing, delivering standalone experiences you could enjoy without having kept up with the series.

My jury’s still out on this format. I don’t think it quite works yet. But writers continue to play with it and learn it. Hopefully, we’ll figure it out because I do like the idea of one long enjoyable narrative.

It’s 1348 in Firenze, Italy. Peasant Licisca is a handmaiden for the worst woman in the world, Filomena, a sort of 1300s version of Paris Hilton. Everything revolves around her. Especially now that her entire family has died from the black plague. Well, except for her dad, but he’s on his way out.

Filomena is visited by a messenger who invites her to Villa Santa at the behest of Leonardo, a really rich bachelor whose plan is to have everyone stay at his villa for one long party until this whole black plague thing goes away.

Filomena ditches her barely alive father, taking Licisca with her, believing she will finally find the husband she so desperately covets. However, along the way, Filomena and Licisca get into a fight that spills out of their carriage and near a bridge where Licisca inadvertently pushes Filomena to her death.

This is when Licisca gets a brilliant idea. Nobody at this place knows what Filomena looks like. So SHE’S going to be Filomena!

Once she gets there, we meet the rest of the crew. There’s the studly doctor, Dioneo, who Licisca immediately crushes on. Dioneo is the doctor for the hapless Panfilo, an ugly dork of a man who can get sick at the drop of a hat. There’s the religious horndog, Neifile, who, unfortunately, married the very gay, Panfilo. Translation: she’s not getting any.

But the biggest surprise is that the two elderly caretakers of the villa, Sirisco and Stratilia, are containing a giant secret. Their master, the owner of the villa, Leonardo, is dead of the black plague. They buried him. If Leonardo is dead, neither of them have masters and they’ll be cast off into homelessness during the worst plague in history. So they must do everything in their power to make sure that their secret never gets out.

What a weird idea.

What a weird FUN idea.

I love a bit of irony in a concept. But the thing with irony is that there are weak versions of it and clever versions of it. This definitely lands on the clever side. One of the things I judge an idea on is how easy it is to come up with. And I’ve never read a single idea that was anything close to this. It’s truly unique. And clever as s—t.

Cause think about it. We’ve seen a bunch of rich people living in these mansions with servants before. That format has been done to death. But this puts an ENTIRELY new spin on it and one that opens up all sorts of fun ideas that the writer takes advantage of.

For example, in what other version of this idea could you kill off the villa owner and everyone just goes along with it? In what other version could your heroine believably take on the persona of a rich noble?

And then you have these interesting relationships. Like this guy who just walks around with his own personal doctor everywhere. As it so happens, the patient is a disgusting rat of a man and the doctor is the most handsome man in the world. So wherever they go, even though he’s the wealthy and important one, everyone falls in love with his doctor.

I think that’s another thing that sets this pilot apart. The writer put a ton of effort not just into the individual characters, but the main relationship that each character had. One with their maid, one with their spouse, one with their doctor, the two caretakers. There are these interesting pairings that lead to a bunch of great dialogue and fun scenarios. It’s almost like teams, which adds a different dynamic when the teams talk to other teams.

I personally think this is going to be too weird for a lot of people. But if you like weird TV and writers that take chances, you’re going to absolutely love this.

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

What I learned: Exploit your premise! Identify what’s unique about your premise and make sure there are characters and plot developments that specifically exploit it. This is a show about rich people vacationing in a big villa while waiting out a plague. So the writer killed a character off and had our hero impersonate her. The writer killed off the villa owner, leaving everyone waiting for a guy who’s never going to show up. Most writers wouldn’t have thought that deep. They would’ve got Licisca and Filomena to the villa together. Leonardo would’ve still been alive. The lazy writer thinks in terms of their original idea and not in terms of, “What does a *lived in* version of my idea look like?” The *lived in* version is always dirtier. Things have already happened inside the lived-in version to muddy it up. So make sure to think beyond that very first concept that came into your head.

Genre: Drama
Premise: (from Black List) After a young, newly widowed janitor in a small mining village is unexpectedly elected Mayor, she navigates a new relationship with a mysterious man from the city and tries to determine how to use her new position of power to confront the corruption that has plagued the town for years.
About: This script finished pretty high on the Black List last year, with 13 votes. The writer has produced a few small projects and has mainly worked in short films.
Writer: Brendan McHugh
Details: 92 pages

Dakota Johnson for Sasha?

Every once in a while, you read a logline on the Black List and you say, “This is such a bad logline that the script must be amazing.” In other words, your script would have to be great to overcome this logline.

This has happened a few times before – where I’d see a terrible logline that was summarizing an equally terrible concept but then something about the writer’s voice or the characters in the script blew me away. It doesn’t happen often. But it does happen. Will it happen again today?

Sasha is a maid in a small corrupt mining town that’s basically run like the mafia by the town’s mining czar, Pike. Technically, the town has a mayor (who’s Sasha’s boss), but he’s a mayor in name only. His sole duty is to do what Pike tells him to do.

Sasha has a particularly combative relationship with Pike due to the fact that her husband recently died in the mines and instead of Pike giving her his life insurance, he tells her that her husband was liable, so there’s no insurance to pay out.

And, oh yeah, Sasha is eight months pregnant.

When Sasha is at her lowest point, a cool-as-a-cucumber surveyor named Jack rides into town on his motorcycle. He asks Sasha out on a date and she says yes. The two have a great time.

The next day, the mayor tells Sasha that reelection is coming up and the election is not official unless he has an opponent so she has to run against him. She doesn’t want to but he forces her to sign the papers. When the miners (who are mostly drunk all the time) learn that Sasha is up for the job, they get excited and Sasha ends up winning in a landslide.

Sasha then starts changing things around town. And helping the miner get better pay. Pike sits her down and says if she gets any chummier with the workers, he’s going to kill her. But she’s already in it. There’s no turning back now.

She enlists her new semi-boyfriend (Jack) for help, only to realize that he was secretly working for Pike this whole time! Jack swears he’s had a change of heart and wants to help Sasha. But can she trust him? Going off the many seasons of Love Island I’ve watched, I can tell you that when a man lies, he’s going to lie again! Stay away from him, girl! But who knows. Maybe Jack will surprise us.

What a weird script.

For starters, it does an excellent job making you love the main character. If you ever want to create a protagonist the audience loves, make your protagonist someone who’s being taken advantage of. And if you want the audience to love them even more, put them in a really crappy situation as well. Someone in a crappy situation who’s being taken advantage of is the screenwriting equivalent of saving thousands of cats.

You just feel for this poor woman. Her husband died. And this a-hole mine czar b.s.’s her about the insurance, saying her husband was negligent so she gets no money to raise her child. We hate this guy more than anything. And, of course, we’re rooting for our screwed-over protagonist to defeat him.

So that part of the script was great which, by the way, is the hardest part of the script to get right. Getting a reader to fall in love with and care about your protagonist is super difficult to do. You could write a thousand-page screenwriting book on how to achieve this and, still, 90% of screenwriters would struggle with it.

Pike is a great villain as well. You know who he reminded me of? Mr. Potter in It’s A Wonderful Life. But even nastier. Cause this guy is willing to kill you if you don’t do what he says.

If you’ve got a hero we love and a villain we hate, you’ve got a readable screenplay. Because when stories are told well, they’re an EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE. The reader is FEELING SOMETHING. The more you’re making them feel, the more they’re going to like your script.

So the fact that we love Sasha and hate Pike does the heavy lifting for Pikesville.

Which is why it’s such a bummer that everything outside of the character work stinks like last night’s fettuccine alfredo. Nothing about this situation feels real. There’s zero specificity. I don’t know what state this is. I don’t even know what COUNTRY this is. Come to think of it, I don’t even know what YEAR it is.

I don’t know if the writer kept these secrets as a deliberate creative choice. But I don’t think he did. None of the character names were capitalized in this script when they were introduced. That tells me this is a newbie writer. And if they’re a newbie writer, they’re more inclined to make mistakes like being too general with the setting.

Why does this matter? Cause this movie plays different if it’s 1975 as opposed to 2023. Women’s rights weren’t nearly as advanced back then as they are today. Which would imply that the writer was making a commentary about that time. But it seems like it’s 2023 and yet we’re treating this girl like she lives in Russia 50 years ago. It’s hard to grasp what’s happening culturally.

This extended into the major plot beats of the script.

I consider major plot beats to be the pillars that hold your screenplay up. You need them to be strong. The first major plot beat here is the mayor saying to his cleaning lady, “You’re running against me for mayor.”

When has this ever happened in the history of the world?

That’s not a pillar made of stone. It’s a pillar made of styrofoam.

One last observation I had was that this is one of the slimmest scripts I’ve read all year. It’s so sparse. And that’s… a good thing? Right? We talk about it all the time. Make the script easy to ready. Keep your prose as sparse as possible.

That’s true for CERTAIN GENRES. But not for every genre. Some genres need more meat. You couldn’t write The Godfather, for example, with 2 line paragraphs all the way through. You wouldn’t be able to add the density necessary to give the story its required weight.

Same thing with Guardians of the Galaxy. There’s too much in that world that needs to be explained for them to distill it down to quick ‘soundbite’ paragraphs.

And I would argue it’s the same for Pikesville. It needed more description of the town, of the setting, of the people. It needed more detail in the interactions in order to convey the complexity of the relationships. Writing this in the style of a 90 minute thriller was not a good decision.

Main character was great. Villain was great. Any time those two were in a scene together, I was on the edge of my seat. But nothing else in the script worked, unfortunately. So I can’t endorse this.

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

What I learned: When major plot points arrive in your script, make sure they’re rock solid. The audience must believe in them 100% or else your story will fall apart. Who’s going to believe that a mayor forces his cleaning lady to run against him? I’m not even convinced you can get away with that in a comedy.

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??

Genre: Dystopian/Horror
Premise: Twin sisters live in a commune where, once they hit puberty, one of the twins becomes a monster and must be killed. But when the twins learn that their community is keeping big secrets from them, they make a run for it.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List with 9 votes. Alexander has written a couple of short films that he’s directed.
Writer: Alexander Thompson
Details: 117 pages

Jenna Ortega playing twins?

Reading scripts that don’t fall under your genre preferences is always a difficult thing. But you have to do it. You have to step out of your comfort zone. Because you never know when you’re going to read that really unique screenplay that blows you away.

With that said, these dystopian commune/lab stories have always felt like a house of cards to me. They never have a lot of meat to them. From Spiderhead to The Giver to Divergent to Equals to The Maze Runner. They give you that one rule that makes their story different from all the others. But the rule is so basic that it doesn’t have the strength to hold up an entire movie.

The only one that worked was The Hunger Games and that’s because it leaned more into its high concept than its dystopian commune genre roots. A movie about kids who have to kill each other, the ultimate irony, is a slam dunk. But all the rest of these might as well be constructed with balsa wood.

I hope to be proven wrong.

Aurora and Gabrielle are 16 year old twins. Which is unusual in our odd dystopian setting. They live in a giant commune in the countryside full of twins. And when the twins go through puberty on this commune, one turns into a rabid monster and the other doesn’t. The town then quickly kills the dangerous monster and the surviving twin moves on with their life.

Aurora, the good girl, and Gabrielle, the bad one, are way past due. Which makes them the focus of everyone’s untrusting eyes wherever they go. One day, when a guy friend of theirs turns, Gabrielle and Aurora find his new monster-self hiding, and realize that he’s totally coherent. He’s not some violent crazy monster like they’ve been educated to believe.

With this shocking new information, Aurora and Gabrielle go on the run, heading into the countryside and staying at a motel. But when they’re recognized, the cops come and grab them, but don’t take them back home. It turns out these monster things are worth a pretty penny on the open market. So Aurora and Gabby escape THEM and that’s when they meet Marty.

Marty is a kind woman who lives in the middle of nowhere. She knows who they are and doesn’t care. She feeds them and tells them they can stay here was long as they want. But one day Aurora follows Marty into the forest to find that she’s locked up a monster in a barn. Not just any monster – Marty’s twin. Yes, Marty once belonged to the commune as well.

It appears that Marty is either going to feed these two to her monster brother or have them mate or who knows what else. Aurora and Gabrielle will have to make one last escape, an escape that will be aided by one of them finally turning.

Ooh boy.

Okay.

This is a typical 2020s Black List script.

It’s got some good stuff in it. But there are just as many times when it feels like it’s being written by a beginner.

The overwriting in particular. Goodness me!

I’ve read so many scripts at this point that I know, when I see the genre, EXACTLY what the page length needs to be for that script to be in its genre sweet spot. If the page count is either shorter than that or longer than that, I know the script won’t be good. This is a 105-110 page concept.

The problem is that it’s overwritten. Every paragraph could be cut in half. For example this: “AURORA has followed her. Gabrielle shakes her head, ‘You needn’t come along’… But Aurora ambles quietly to her side, and onward they go together.” Could easily be: “AURORA follows along. Gabrielle shakes her head, ‘No.’ But Aurora insists and they continue on.’”

You may look at that and think I’m nitpicking. Trust me. When there are 1000 paragraphs in a script that all read too bulky? That drives the reader insane. More importantly, it slows your script waaaaaay down. Which was a huge problem here. I thought I was on on page 45. I checked and I was still on page 24. That issue was specifically due to this overwriting.

And by the way – yes, it’s better to break your action-description paragraphs up into 3-line chunks as opposed to writing 10-line paragraphs. But if you’re writing an entire page of 3-line paragraphs with no dialogue, it’s not that different from a reader having to read 2 15-line paragraphs. It’s still a wall of text.

So the solution is to cut down the overall words that you’re writing. Cause chances are you’re using a lot more words and sentences than you need to. ESPECIALLY if you’re a beginner. Beginners always make this mistake. And it’s a huge reason why they don’t get responses after script reads. It probably doesn’t have to do with the story content as much as the reader getting frustrated by the endless of chunks of needless sentences they have to endure.

This script suffered big time from that.

Now, like I said, it wasn’t all bad.

The story is built around a strong line of suspense. We know that one of these girls is going to turn into a monster at some point. That’s a nice dangling carrot to keep us turning these overwritten pages.

There’s contrast between the two main characters, the sisters. Gabby’s a shark. Aurora’s sweet. What this does is that every time the two encounter an obstacle, they’re going to have different opinions on how to solve the problem. That’s where you get your conflict. And if you add some urgency to those situations – such as there’s a cop coming downstairs in five seconds and a decision needs to be made – you’re going to come upon some entertaining moments.

Also, once they leave the commune, the script becomes a million times better. Getting through that sludge-like opening act was like trying to run during a nightmare. You’re not going anywhere. I think at one point I had turned the page only to find out I’d somehow gone backwards.

Why is that? Well, because the first act was built entirely around WAITING AROUND. I’ve told you guys this before. “Waiting Around Narratives,” are some of the most boring narratives you can write. Movies work best with active characters, not passive characters. Once these two become active and go on the run, the script gets a shot of adrenaline.

It wasn’t enough to win me over, though. The YA lab genre has always been uninspiring to me. I feel like anyone could come up with one of these concepts in thirty seconds. Here, I’ll come up with one right now. Children are all raised in a remote commune. At 10, all girls become vampires and all guys get telepathy. Boom, there’s a YA concept for anyone who wants it.

I’m joking but they really do come off like that sometimes.

I will give this script credit for making me care more than I usually do for this genre. But the overwriting and the fact that it’s not my thing makes this a ‘no thank you’ on my end.

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

What I learned: Don’t listen to me when it comes to the commercial viability of YA concepts. I may not like them but a lot of people do. So if you like YA, write a YA script. I would extrapolate that advice beyond YA. Don’t make decisions about what you do or do not write based on one person hating that type of movie. In the end, if you’re passionate about the concept and think you’ve got a great idea where you can bring something fresh to the script? Then go ahead and write that script.

What I learned 2: Also, for all my bickering about this subject matter, I give credit to the writer for writing a coming-of-age movie with a marketable slant.  This is way more interesting than if it had been yet another script about a girl coming of age in her boring small town.

Genre: TV – 1 hour drama
Premise: Two dads in Suffolk County engage in an intense feud that bubbles over into their innocent childrens’ baseball league.
About:  A huge article purchase from over on Esquire (article has a paywall unfortunately).  Jason Bateman and Netflix continue their love affair as the streamer paid big bucks to bring their Ozark pal back into its arms (Netflix beat out SEVEN other rabid suitors). Bateman will direct and star in the show about two little league fathers who get into a very intense rivalry that involves criminal activity. They’re going to have to figure out a better title though because when I first saw this, I thought it was a story about a Cinderella-type ball that dads attended.
Writer: David Gauvey Herbert
Details: About 6000 words

One of the best ways to sell anything in this business is to write a story that’s similar to a recent hit.

This actually used to be harder because the strategy was built almost entirely around giant movie successes. So if Armageddon made a billion dollars its opening weekend, you’d be competing against thousands of other screenwriters with your “Armageddon adjacent” spec script. A giant Astroid threatens the world? Well, what about a giant tidal wave!?

But these days, there are a lot more opportunities because success has become more relative and diversified. A crafty screenwriter looks for smaller “mini-successes” and pitches projects similar to them.

Case in point, today’s sale. The Daddy Ball project was clearly pitching itself as “The next Beef.” And boy is that a powerful pitch when all of the elements align. You have to be in the minds of these buyers. They’re terrified of buying something that sucks. So any little image you can put in their mind that indicates success – like a recently popular show – helps out.

With that said, I’ve found that you have to be careful not to jump onto mega hits. I experienced this myself a couple years ago while trying to pitch a really good racing pilot with a writer. We pitched it as a Succession set in the south. What I didn’t realize was that, literally, EVERYONE was pitching “Succession set in the [blank].” And when that happens, the pitch goes right through one ear and out the other.

This pitch was perfect because Beef was a hit but a low-key hit. Not everyone saw it. And not everyone who did see it, liked it. However, the people who did like it, loved it. And, so, when you pitched “Beef set in the world of little league baseball,” your competition was small and the people who loved Beef were DEFINITELY going to request the script.

Back in the late 2000s, in Suffolk County, Bobby Sanfilippo was excited to get his 10 year old son into the local little league scene, which was becoming a big deal. To get on one of these traveling teams, you had to fork up a couple grand. But Bobby was more than happy to, since his son (who can’t be named) loved baseball.

Bobby’s son joined a team called the Inferno and that’s when Bobby first met John Reardon, a sort of daddy psychopath. John’s son Jack would come onto the team and be an instant star. He had all the makings of a kid who could go pro one day. Much better than Bobby’s son, who was just a good player who loved baseball.

When the team started to get really good, parents wanted to get rid of the weak players. John seemed to spearhead the movement to get rid of people like Bobby’s son. So Bobby, who was doing well financially, took his son and STARTED HIS OWN TEAM, naming it, “Vengeance.”

Not long after, the two teams would play, Jack’s team would win, and John would scream some really terrible things at Bobby’s son. When the Vengeance coaches called him out on it, John pulled out a bat and came at them. In the end, everybody calmed down, but this daddy rivalry had gone up a notch.

One day John started getting all these text messages sent from an anonymous phone that contained pictures of his family doing everyday activities accompanied with threats that John was “done.”

Several months later, during a Vengeance game, the police showed up, arrested Bobby for the messages, and made him do the perp walk of shame in front of his team. Although Bobby denied sending the messages, the damage had been done. The team was never the same since many of the parents believed Bobby was guilty.

Bobby had always contended that John was friends with the local police chief and the two had constructed this hit job together. A couple years later, this gained more credence when that police chief was taken down by the FBI for running his precinct like the KGB. In the end, both fathers still think they were right in all the things they did. And both still hate each other.

I’m not sure what to make of these non-traditional magazine article sales. You guys remember that Monopoly one from a couple of years ago? The one that Matt and Ben bought? That thing died in a blaze of glory quicker than you could say, “How bout them apples.”

I understand why this sold. In addition to the “Beef” connection, you’ve got that all important conceptual irony to hang your baseball cap on. It’s because this is set in the world of little league baseball that it has a juicier taste. You shouldn’t be sending life-threatening messages over junior sporting events.

But I was hoping for a lot more chaos. I actually thought, when I read about this in the trades, that it was going to end in murder. That’s the expectation with these true stories now. So, when you don’t get all the way there, the audience is like, “That’s it??”

At the very least, I was hoping for an ongoing rivalry between the two teams. But there were only two games and both of them were uneventful except for Jack striking out Bobby’s son and John bringing out a bat afterwards, a bat he didn’t even use.

That’s what this story felt like to me. A whole lot of blue baseballs.  It was always on the brink of something gnarly happening but nothing gnarly ever happened. In fact, any sort of issue between the two dads was an adjacent issue. When Bobby’s son left the Inferno, for example, it wasn’t John who kicked him off. It’s not even clear if John had any opinion on getting Bobby’s son off the team.

And then there’s this big thread about how John was distantly related to the local police chief, which is why the two had worked together to illegally take down Bobby. But that’s never proven. The evidence actually leans towards the two never having spoken to each other in their lives.

Stories work best when the attacks ARE DIRECT. Not adjacent. In Beef, it wasn’t that Danny *might have* kidnapped Amy’s daughter. He *DID* kidnap her daughter.

Unfortunately, this feels like a writer who thought there was more to this story than there was, spent a couple of years and a lot of interviews on it only to find out, in the end, it was really a rather tame story. He then did his best to imply a lot of bad things happened.

To be fair, it worked out. It’s being turned into a TV series. But for this to work, they’re going to have to add A LOT MORE to the story. This needs to be completely fictional if it’s going to be as entertaining as Beef. If they filmed this as is, people are going to leave this series saying, “Did you really just make a TV show about two people who yelled at each other a couple of times?”

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

What I learned: In a script like this, you need at last one “Holy S—t” moment. If you don’t have a “Holy S—t” moment in a movie or show about a bitter feud, then the feud you’re writing about isn’t nasty enough. Beef has that shocking traumatic ending. There’s also the house burning down. There’s Danny secretly sabotaging his brother’s future. There isn’t a single “Holy S—t” moment in Daddy Ball.