Genre: TV Pilot – Supernatural
Premise: In the late 19th century, a mysterious American businessman moves into London, one whose revolutionary technology threatens to destabilize a hidden world order. That man is Dracula.
About: This is a HUGE coup for writer Cole Haddon. He had gained some notoriety for his 2010 script, “Hyde” (about a rehabilitated Dr. Jekyll who’s pulled out of prison to help hunt a new monster created through the Hyde serum) but I haven’t heard much about that project since. To get a project actually ON NBC as an un-credited screenwriter – I mean wow. Talk about the dream baby. “Dracula” premieres on NBC October 28th and stars that hunky actor from Bend It Like Beckham, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, as the biggest vampire of them all.
Writer: Cole Haddon
Details: 6-13-12 draft – 60 pages
I started reading The Sixth Gun (another TV pilot) for review, got a few pages in, and just knew it wasn’t for me. Monks wielding machine guns. Cowboys shooting into the ground with special bullets that raised the dead. My buddy Roger would’ve loved this. But to me it was a bunch of nonsensical mayhem.
And the reality of this business is that if it’s not a reader’s cup of tea (genre, type of show, type of movie), it’s impossible to win that reader over. I mean imagine, my male readers, someone asking you to read 50 Shades of Grey. Is there any circumstance under which you’d like it? Probably not, right? Now you know how readers feel when they get a “not their cup of tea” script.
And that’s a killer. Because when you get rejected, you assume it’s because of some fault in your script. But what if it’s being read by someone who had zero chance of liking the script in the first place? Since getting people to read your script is rare, that reaction may be all you have to go on. And you’re now erroneously thinking your script is terrible because the guy hated it. As if our jobs aren’t hard enough!
So since I didn’t dig “The Sixth Gun,” I got to pull out NBC’s sexy new re-interpretation of Dracula. Normally I’d say, “NBC? Ehhhh, the Peacock’s not exactly flashing its feathers.” But you know what? They made that Hannibal show look pretty cool. And Dracula oozes that same level of production design. Maybe NBC is finally realizing that in order to stay relevant, they need to take chances. Let’s find out if that’s the case here.
London. 1896. The world is in flux. There are whispers that war is inevitable, a war that will position the English for world domination. How do they plan to fund this war? Fossil fuels – the future of energy for the next 100 years. Everyone in the country has banked their livelihoods on it.
Which is why nobody likes the new rich guy in town, American Allan Grayson. The ageless sunglass-sporting heartthrob has announced his arrival in a big way, throwing a gargantuan party at his mansion. There, he reveals, his company will start selling WIRELESS ELECTRICITY, a form of free energy that will make fossil fuels, well, fossils. Naturally, England’s upper crust does not think highly of this.
Oh, there’s one more thing about Allan I forgot to tell you. He’s like a thousand year old vampire. Who happens to go by the name “Dracula.” Yeah, Allan’s Dracula. And upon throwing his party, he becomes taken with a young woman named Mina. Mina is one of the few women at the time who believed in women’s rights and that women should get an education, which makes her a freak of nature in society. But not to Allan. To Allan, this girl is dee-licious, mainly due to the fact that his wife, who died 500 years ago, looks EXACTLY like her. Kind of like how Robert Pattison’s new girlfriend looks exactly like Kristin Stewart? (Wanted to include a vampire reference)
So while Allan’s off trying to persuade Mina to hitch a ride on the Blood Train, a secret organization known as “The Order” (who may or may not be vampires themselves) is meeting to discuss that a new vampire has entered the region. They don’t know this vampire is Allan, but you get the sense that when they do, someone’s going to become really friendly with a wooden stake.
Is the world ready for another vampire product? Well, here’s the cool thing about the vampire business. They can keep trading off between vampires and Dracula. When vampires get hot (Twilight), Dracula takes a back seat. When vampires get cold (Twilight), Dracula can re-emerge. This ensures that there’s ALWAYS a pale well-manicured rogue sleeping around. Cool, huh!
But what about THIS Dracula? Any good? On a scale of one blood sucking second to ten? I’d give it a seven. The more of these TV pilots (that make it to air) I read, the more I realize they’re all pretty good. There are so many pilots purchased, and then so many developed, that only the best of the best of those – the ones that get to TV – are any good. And therefore it’s rare to find a truly awful script.
But I just want someone to UPDATE this guy. I’m tired of seeing Dracula in dainty period clothes. I want to see them do to Dracula what The Devil’s Advocate did with the devil. Al Pacino that mother*&$%r. Or, do something unique with the show, flashing back and forth between 200 years ago and present day. I wanted to experience something fresh here, to be knocked off my feet. But it was more of the same (for the most part). I understand how scary it can be for a network or studio to take a chance, which is why it’s rarely done, but man: TAKE A CHANCE! Or AMC and FX and NETFLIX are going to make you a dinosaur. Don’t become the Blockbuster of the TV network business.
To Haddon’s credit, there are SOME new things. Dracula as an energy entrepreneur, for example. That was fresh. And then our good friend Van Helsing is a local professor who also happens to be Dracula’s right hand man. That was neat. But it wasn’t enough to really get me on board. And when I say, “On board,” I mean the kind of thing I’m going to tell my friends about. “Holy shit? Did you see Dracula last night!!?? All that weird shit that happened!?” I would say that for shows like Lost (giant monster and a polar bear on the island??) and Breaking Bad (“You have got to see this crazy dude, Tuco!”). I didn’t get that here. It was dipping its toes in risk, but never jumped all the way into the pool.
But the structure and writing were good. Remember that for every episode, you want one of your characters driving the story. They must be after something, as that something will be the “engine” that makes the episode go. Most of the time, that goal will be assigned to your protagonist (in this case, I THINK that’s Mina, although I’m not positive). If your protagonist isn’t driving, then consider having your antagonist drive. The main goal driving this episode, for example, is Allan’s pursuit of Mina. She is his goal. And we watch to see if he’ll get her.
In addition to this, you need a SERIES GOAL that’s going to drive the entirety of the series. If we don’t see that, we know the series isn’t going to have any legs. For example, with Lost, it’s “Will they get off the island?” That was the beauty of that show. It was so simple and powerful, the two things you want your series goal to be.
Here, it’s more complicated. Allan’s goal is to move into and destroy this energy monopoly. With The Order opposed to that, we know there’s going to be plenty of episodes driven by that conflict. My question is, is that a big enough engine? Cause the series engine needs to be as big as you can make it. It’s one thing to dangle a fun little nugget at the end of the pilot so that they’ll tune in next week. It’s much more important to give them something huge so they’ll mentally make that commitment to watch the whole season. Again, that’s what Lost did. I’m not sure the plot here achieved that. The series goal is just too small.
Of course, another way to get people to keep watching is great characters. If we like the characters, we’ll want to see them every week. To that end, there are some hits and misses. Dracula’s intriguing. Mina’s intriguing, as she’s a female trying to make it in a man’s world. Professor Helsing is a cool shadowy figure. But none of these characters are so memorable that I must see them again. Casting might help that a little (and I really like Rhys-Meyers), but I’ve always found that you can only improve a character so much with casting. It has to be in the script.
And that script was solid, just not great. I may check this out out of curiosity. But they’re going to have to hit on all cylinders to get me to keep tuning in every week.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Bad script dates – I see a lot of writers give their scripts out to that ONE industry contact they have, get bad feedback, then go into a six month depression. Here’s the thing. That read might’ve been the result of a bad script date, a reader who just isn’t into your kind of material. Regardless of what you did, they weren’t going to like it. This was the case with The Sixth Gun, the script I chose to ditch today, and it happens with readers ALL THE TIME. In order to get a true gauge on how good your script is, get it to at least 5 people (doesn’t have to be industry people – just anyone who will read it and give you feedback). If you’re not getting any, “Wow, this is REALLY goods,” or “Can I give this to my friend who works at Bad Robot?” then it’s time to knock your friends up for their REAL opinions (not their “being nice” opinions) so you can clean up the issues in your script and get the best version possible out there.
