Genre: TV Pilot – 1 hour drama
Premise: An antiquities expert and an art thief team up to catch a terrorist who funds his attacks by selling treasure he finds from around the world on the black market.
About: Today’s writers have worked in TV for a long time, writing on such shows as Limitless, Human Target, and Jericho. Blood & Treasure was picked up for a guaranteed 13 episode order and will appear on CBS this summer.
Writers: Matthew Federman & Stephen Scaia
Cobra Kai has reinvigorated my love for TV. Before it, I had to buy smelling salts to keep myself awake during episodes of Westworld. Now I have this great show where the writers of Harold and Kumar somehow created a series where every one of the main characters is nuanced. Who would’ve thought?
Blood & Treasure is a network show, which, these days, is the equivalent of pitching a new Atari 2600 game. Are they still making these generic bake-offs? I guess so. But to the creators’ credit, this sounds fun. Keeping with our Indiana Jones themed week, we got a show that revolves around tomb raiders. Any story that has tomb-raiding in it can’t be below average.
Can it?
After Dr. Elizabeth Castillo is kidnapped by thought-to-be-dead terrorist Karim Farouk, who stole a 2000 year old cross from her worth 50 million dollars, we cut to Professor Danny McNamara in New York. Danny just got a text from Castillo giving him the lowdown on her situation.
Danny heads to the Homeland Security unit where he used to work and tells them that, dammit, he’s going to go rescue Castillo AND get that cross back. Homeland isn’t into it but he goes anyway! First he’s got to find his old girlfriend though, who’s a globetrotting lying thief. But she’s hot. So that doesn’t matter.
Danny meets Lexi in the French Riviera, and it turns out she’s already looking for Farouk herself. In fact, she knows that after a short plane ride to Rome, they can attend a secret bazaar where the cross and a bunch of other antiquities will be up for sale! Sweet! So off they go, trading quips along the way.
Once there, they meet a guy who knows Farouk and slip a tracker onto him so he can lead them right to him! They end up at a warehouse where they find Castillo alive. Yay! But the building is rigged with a ticking time bomb. Boo! Which they’ll need to defuse if they want to get out of here alive.
Spoiler Alert. They live. And while Farouk gets away, Homeland Security is impressed enough with their teamwork that they award our formal couple with their own division – a division that stops terrorists who steal antiquities to fund their terrorist plots.
Believe it or not, despite that summary, this pilot does have some things to offer, the biggest of which is that it MOOOOOVES. It moves fast. One of the first and most important lessons one learns in screenwriting is that every scene should move the story forward. And these writers take that lesson and hook onto the back of a tomahawk missile.
I didn’t realize how happy I was to experience this until I remembered yesterday’s script – and really lots of scripts I’ve been reviewing – where writers are fine with moseying along, taking 3-4 scenes to do what they could’ve done in one. Having characters sit around and talk a lot, while fun for writers to write, isn’t fun to read.
Never forget how quickly a reader gets bored. It can happen within a page. So you want to pack purpose into every scene. If you’re not using a scene to set up where your characters are going next, then you better give us a scene with some intense conflict. We the reader need to be entertained at all times. Don’t disappoint us.
Unfortunately, the rest of this pilot is, quite possibly, the most generic thing I’ve ever read. All the lines are generic (“If this thing goes sideways, we can all kiss our careers goodbye.”). The cities are generic. New York! Rome! We’re using the old tracking device move. We even have a ticking time bomb scene where we have to cut the properly colored wire (although, to the writers’ credit, they added a fun twist in that the bomb instruction booklet was written in Romanian).
I know I’m dealing with a real writer when I get specificity. When, if we’re in Rome, the writer can describe the details of Rome in a way that only someone who’s been there could describe them. Not the way that somebody who’s only experienced Rome through movies and television would describe it.
Like Saturday, when I told you I went to Madrid. Unless you’ve been to Madrid, you’ve never heard of the Retiro. So you wouldn’t be able to write about it. That lack of specificity adds up. The less of a world that’s described, the more generic the painting gets.
The one area where they did research was on these antiquities, which was cool. But if you’re going to do a globe-trotting TV show, you have to do the hard work. You have to do the research about all of these places so it feels like we’re there. It’s all about the suspension of disbelief. And with a flashy show like this, you can fool people for a few episodes. But sooner or later they’re going to realize that they know more about the places you’re showing them than you do. And then you’re fucked.
It sucks because I could see this show being fun. Every week you’re introduced to a new “Lost Ark.” And the decision to flip the “Indiana Jones” role over to the show’s bad guy was a clever one. It reminded me of how they flipped the focus onto Johnny as opposed to Daniel in the greatest show ever made, Cobra Kai.
But can this show survive writing that only believes there are three cities in the world? New York, Paris, and Rome? I don’t know. I hope future episodes get a little more exotic.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The more important the goal of each scene is, the faster your script is going to move. So if the point of a scene is to drug the bad guy to steal his phone in order to find out where the terrorist is, we’re going to feel like the script is charging forward. But if the goal of a scene is for the hero to find out how his friend is feeling about life, we’re not charging forward at all. And I know that scripts need a mix of these two things. It can’t all be “go go go.” But what I’m telling you is, if the point of a scene doesn’t feel important, you’re risking reader boredom. That’s all.
