We also answer a screenwriting question that seems to be getting asked more and more every day: Is the character description dead?
Genre: Spy, 1 hour drama
Premise: A CIA director who heads up the “Lioness” division recruits a new female operative to embed into a Middle Eastern family in order to take down the patriarch, a high level target.
About: Where would Paramount Plus be without Taylor Sheridan? I’ll tell you where. THEY WOULDN’T EXIST. Sheridan keeps propping the streamer up and he’s done it again with his latest show, Lioness, which will feature Avatar star, Zoe Saldana.
Writer: Taylor Sheridan
Details: Just 46 pages
Taylor Sheridan is amazing.
I’ve said this before but I remember when he was just some name on the Black List, like everyone else. And he’s since turned his name into an empire. If it can happen to him, why can’t it happen to you? It’s 2023. Anything is possible. Except for nice weather in Los Angeles apparently.
Recently, Sheridan’s been running into a problem that very few people ever have to deal with. He’s got so many hits, he doesn’t have time to write anymore. Yet he’s still writing. He admitted he wrote the pilot to Tulsa King in a weekend. Did he try and top that by writing Lioness over an extended lunch?
At what point does the quality of the work begin to suffer? Cause for me it would’ve suffered on show #2. Sheridan is now on show #8. By the way, Tulsa King is a really fun time if you haven’t seen it. And you probably haven’t, since nobody has Paramount Plus. But it’s a great screenwriting class in scene-writing. Terrence Winter, the showrunner, makes every single scene a mini-movie. It’s well worth checking out.
Onto Lioness.
Joe is a high level CIA director who works out of Syria. She heads up something called the “Lioness” division, which was originally conceived because they needed female soldiers to pat down younger women in the Middle East. But the division has expanded massively since then and now, primarily, involves embedding a female operative into a family friendship in the hopes of setting up an assassination on the high level target male in the family.
But Joe has got a secret. When stuff gets bad, she’s not exactly someone you can depend on. In her most recent operation, when her operative is discovered, instead of sending in a team to rescue her, she orders the home and family to be blown up. Take out the high level target and, oh well, the collateral damage that is one of her own.
Cruz is a 23 year old Oklahoma City girl who somehow found her way in bed with some bad people, including drug dealer slash boyfriend, Edward. After a beatdown by Edward, Cruz has had enough and pummels him with a frying pan before running for her life. She runs straight into a marine recruiting office with Edward on her tail. The marine asks the arriving Edward if he’s got a problem. Edward angrily leaves with his tail between his legs.
Cruz takes the marine recruitment exam and scores off the charts. She later takes the physical exam and sets records. Not just girl records. She flirts with records that even the men have. The marines realize they’ve got a diamond in the rough and Cruz is fast tracked to several cool missions.
Several years later, she ends up in front of Joe. Both of these women are as cold as a Chicago winter so they don’t exactly get along. But Cruz agrees to be the latest lioness, where she’ll be embedded into a rich Afghanistan family by becoming friends with the daughter, who’s roughly Cruz’s age. As she makes first contact with the family, we quietly wonder if she’s just signed her own death warrant. Not from the family. But from her superior, the woman who’s supposed to protect her at all costs.
I don’t know how Taylor Sheridan does it. But he writes women that are kick-a$$ that in no way feel woke. 9 out of every 10 women written in Hollywood these days are amazing at everything they do without explanation. They are an army of Mary Woken Sues.
You never feel that when you read a Sheridan female character. Which is probably why his female characters are so much better than everyone else’s. For example, there’s an early scene where Cruz beats up a woman in Edward’s crew and Edward punches her in retaliation. I just don’t think anyone else in Hollywood would write that beat right now. They’d be terrified.
And that’s the problem. That beat rings true. Cause in the real world, drug dealers aren’t on Twitter worrying about getting canceled. They’re crazy violent psychopaths obsessed with how much money they’re making and they treat women the way you’d expect people like that to treat women. So it’s a moment that rings true to the audience and circumvents all this fake wishful thinking utopia nonsense that you see on TV these days.
If we feel that the writer is being honest, we’re way more likely to suspend our disbelief and go along with the story.
Beyond making the female characters feel genuine, he makes them awesome. The scene where Cruz takes a frying pan, wakes up Edward, starts beating him with it, then runs, with him chasing her through the city, where she finally ends up at the Marine recruitment office, is easily the best army recruit scene I’ve ever seen. It also makes this girl such a bad-a$$.
His other main female character is great too. I loved the scene where Joe is looking at her operative being compromised and she makes the call to get rid of her. It’s an uncomfortable moment that too many writers are afraid of writing these days. They’d say, “Oh, this makes Joe unlikable. So we can’t do that.” No, the fact that it’s such a controversial decision is what makes the character so interesting. It also sets up a great question for the remainder of the series. Will she do the same to Cruz?
Separate from that, I want to give props to Sheridan. I love his character introductions. And I noticed that WyldWrite put together a list of all the main character introduction of all the Oscar hopeful scripts this year. Props to him because I’m going to copy-and-past what he wrote.
The skinny is that he was surprised at just how weak all the character descriptions in these scripts were. Here they are…
—(SULLIVAN), a good-looking man of 35 or so,
HENRY PELHAM (mid-40s, disheveled)
JULIO STRASSERA, 55, thick-framed glasses, bulky mustache, and bags under his eyes. He combs his wet hair.
a boy of twelve: PAUL GRAFF, red-haired and pale and freckled and bespectacled.
MAREN (17, Mixed Race)
CHARLIE CULLEN, 36, small, sinewy and very pale. His hair is flecked with silver, his scrubs are bachelor white. Charlie is leached of colour, except for his eyes, they glisten.
CLOSE on the piercing blue eyes of CONSTANCE REID (”CONNIE” – 23).
PETER, 24, is dressed identically to his fellow commuters, though his suit is of a lighter shade and less broken in.
GAIL BISHOP, mid 40s, black, upright and unyielding.
TOM BURGESS (60s) walks his dog along rocky bluffs edging the sea. It’s a blustery day. Tom has the build of a lifelong athlete, though his face has become rugged with sun exposure. His broad shoulders are hunched with tension.
If you’re someone who’s always hated character descriptions, this is good news for you, since it’s proof positive that Oscar-worthy screenplays can have weak character descriptions.
But I will remind you that a lot of these are director-writers. They are also scripts that are written with an actor already attached. In both of these scenarios, character descriptions aren’t important because you’re not trying to create a visual for readers. Your focus is on the movie. And if you already have Denzel in your film, there’s no reason to spend five hours coming up with the greatest description of Denzel’s character ever.
However, if you’re writing specs, it’s important because you’re still in the stage where you’re trying to paint a picture for people so they can imagine the movie. If they can’t imagine the movie, why would they make the movie? Your job is to help them out in that department. And one of the many ways you can do this is by writing great descriptions for your main characters. Which Sheridan is consistently good at.
Here’s one of his early character intros, which I love…
“A MAN IN HIS 30S, thick beard, wears a t-shirt, ball cap on backwards, Oakleys, and blue jeans — looks like he was on the way to the mall then decided to go to war.”
I mean how much better is that than all the nonsense descriptions above?
Details matter. They are what’s going to elevate your screenplay. So don’t use directors who only care about what’s on screen and not as much about what’s on the page as excuses for why you don’t need to write detailed character intros. Or detailed anything, for that matter.
The only thing I didn’t like about this script was the ending. We were building up to this important moment where Cruz has to win over the family’s daughter in a shopping mall. The whole show depends on Cruz being able to infiltrate the family. And, yet, the daughter literally does all the work for her. Cruz doesn’t have to do anything and she’s in.
You want to do the opposite. Cruz should encounter a major obstacle and cleverly overcome it to get into the daughter’s good graces for the perfect climax to the pilot. That was a big enough error to bring this down from an “impressive” and probably has to do with Sheridan whipping this script together between pop-tart toastings.
But, overall, Hollywood’s current screenwriting superstar does it again.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A great way to find a show is to identify one of these specialized military programs and create a show around them. Go do it right now! Google ‘special programs’ in the military. You could find yourself a show in the next ten minutes.
I asked ChatGPT and they suggested this one: “The United States Military Working Dog Program: This program trains and uses dogs for various military missions, including detecting explosive devices, conducting patrols, and providing security.”
Sounds like a show to me!
