It’s the movie-nerd team-up of the year. JJ Abrams and Jordan Peele unite for a brand new show on HBO!
Genre: TV Pilot/Horror Sci-Fi
Premise: A young African-American man travels across the U.S. in the 1950s to a mysterious town to learn about where his deceased mother came from.
About: HBO Max is slowly working its way into becoming a legit streaming contender. Last week they gave us a new Seth Rogen comedy. This week they hit us with a JJ Abrams Jordan Peele collaboration. The show is based on the novel of the same name by 55 year old Matt Ruff. Ruff had been writing his whole life but didn’t start to make noise until he published 2007’s Bad Monkeys, which was about a secret organization dedicated to eliminating individuals who are guilty of heinous crimes. Ironically, Lovecraft Country started out as a TV pitch, but when he didn’t get any traction, he wrote it as a novel. It has now become a TV show. The novel was adapted by Misha Green.
Writer: Misha Green (novel by Matt Ruff)
Details: 64 minutes
Excuse me for a second…
I’m currently…
Whoa!
Fighting something…
Hold on….
Ow!
Duck!
Back! Back! Get away!
Phew… made it.
Sorry guys. I was taking on a fire tornado.
And here I thought the riots a few blocks down on Melrose were the worst thing I’d have to deal with all year.
Today’s review is going to be fun. We’ve got a trio of strong creators delivering this entry. First, Scriptshadow crush JJ Abrams, he who can do no wrong. We’ve got Jordan Peele, new kid on the block and torch-bearer for Hollywood’s current diversity push. And then we’ve got old friend of the site, Misha Green, who adapted the novel.
I remember talking to Misha back in the day about how difficult being a screenwriter was. She’d written this great script called Sunflower, which is still in my Top 25. William Friedkin (The Exorcist) was interested in making it. But the whole process felt helpless to her. She was basically hoping Friedkin would make her movie instead of some other movie. If he did choose another movie, she was back to square 1. Another unknown writer just trying to get a job.
Now look at her. She’s working with two of the biggest names in town, JJ Abrams and Jordan Peele. And she’s got this awesome-looking new show. The second I saw the trailer, I had to see it. I even signed up for HBO Max! That despite being subscribed to HBO, HBO Now, HBO Go, and HBO Wowzers. I’m probably funding Peele’s producer fee on the show all by myself.
We start off with our African-American 20-something hero, Tic, in the middle of a World War 2 battle. But this isn’t a normal battle. American soldiers are fighting Romans. UFOs splash spotlights down on the battlefield. And there are giant War of the Worlds alien tripods shooting lasers, killing everyone in sight.
Tic wakes up in the back of a bus (black people have to sit in the back in these days) with a geeky book in hand and we realize he just really likes science-fiction stories. Tic gets back to his old neighborhood in Chicago where he bumps into his Uncle George, who runs a business that helps black people travel across the country (it can be dangerous traveling alone when you’re black in the 1950s).
Tic says he found an old letter that may shed some light on his mysterious mom’s (who’s since passed away) side of the family. Says she came from some place called “Ardham,” which isn’t even on a map. Well, unless you’re looking at a 200 year old map, that is. That crusty ancient map puts Ardham in the middle of the deep south. So away they go.
George and Tic are joined by the rambunctious and multi-talented “Leti.” I say multi-talented because she’s a sci-fi writer, an amazing singer, and a track star with jaw-dropping 40-yard speed. They’re going to drop Leti off halfway to Ardham at her father’s. But when she and her dad get into a fight, she has no choice but to come with Tic and Uncle George.
The group gets all the way to the forest where Ardham is supposed to be. But instead of meeting a bunch of mother’s welcoming descendants, they’re stopped by a really mean white sheriff. Really mean white sheriff informs them that this is a “sundown” town. That means if he finds any black people out after sundown, it’s the law to hang them. Sundown, by the way, is seven minutes away.
So the group get in the car and must reach the county line before those seven minutes are up, all with really mean white sheriff right behind them. This ensures that they can’t go over the speed limit, boxing them into an impossible escape. Will they make it out in time? Something tells me we won’t have a show unless they do. However, their escape is anything but a given.
This was one of the best looking TV shows I’ve seen in a long time. The production value was through the roof. There wasn’t a single shot that wasn’t jaw-droppingly beautiful. There wasn’t an actor lit anything but perfectly. You could replace the show sound with your favorite music and it work as a beautiful audio-visual poem.
But Carson, this is a screenwriting site. What about the writing!?
The writing was mostly good.
If you’re an aspiring TV writer, a great place to start your story is with your hero coming back home. Lives are usually the most interesting during times of major transition. Coming back home after a long absence tends to be one of the more major transitions you’re going to have in life.
It also acts as a natural accelerant for story engines. If Tic had been living at home all this time, it might seem strange that only now, all of a sudden, does he want to go off on this big adventure. It’s the fact that he’s transitioning that it makes sense that a new chapter in his life is about to begin.
Where the pilot struggles is in everything from Tic’s return home until the last ten minutes. The writers run up against the same issues we talk about all the time on the site. You’ve got to set things up early. Characters, backstory, exposition, how everybody fits into the puzzle. You can get so consumed by cramming all that in, you forget to entertain us. The snore factory was getting warmed up when Leti does her dramatically pointless singing number.
Things do pick up once we get on the road. The problem is the road is mostly filled with cliched scenes. For example, there’s the classic situation of our black heroes going to a diner in a white town and mean nasty white people don’t want to serve them. That’s followed by a car chase with three white people in a pickup trying to shoot them.
They weren’t bad scenes. But they played out so on-the-nose that I found myself getting bored. One thing you always want to play with in storytelling is expectations. Figure out what the viewer expects and give them something different. What if, for example, our trio had walked into the diner and the white people there were extremely nice? But like, OVERLY nice. To the point where it was suspicious. Now you’ve set up an interesting situation without the cliche.
(PRO-TIP: If 9 out of 10 writers would’ve come up with the exact same set piece scenario had they written your premise, you probably don’t want to use that scenario)
Luckily, the pilot ends big. This is Pilot Writing 101, folks. Make those last ten minutes count. Before these last ten minutes, I wasn’t going to watch another episode. But after this climax, I’ll definitely check out episode 2.
The sequence takes place as they’re trying to escape Evil White Sheriff Guy. The scene itself is clever. If you’re going to do car chase scenes, you need to look for ways to make them unique. Ruff and Green achieve this by making it so our heroes have to get to the county line within seven minutes. But they have to stay under the speed limit of 25 mph the whole time. That made for a tense car chase scenario I hadn’t seen before.
But it’s what happened after that moment that elevated the sequence. They just BARELY get to the county line and escape. This results in celebration. They can’t believe it. They barely escaped death. We’re happy for them. And then all their eyes go big. They look up and there are three new cop cars blocking the road. The sheriff simply called the neighboring county and told them they were coming.
This is a VERY powerful tool. The “GET AWAY, BUT NO THEY DIDN’T GET AWAY” device. It works because emotions are most charged at the extremes. When things are really great or when things are really terrible. So if you can find ways in writing to take us from one of those extremes to the other in quick succession, it’ll hit your viewers like an anvil. It’s impossible for them to not have an emotional reaction when you do this.
And, from there, we get a hell of an ending where the group is attacked by something and our heroes must momentarily team up with the police who were just about to kill them. That ending and the stellar production value were just enough to get me to next week. Here’s hoping, now that we’ve got the setup behind us, that this show is ready to kick butt.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: On the website, “Women Write About Comics,” they asked author Matt Ruff how he’s able to consistently surprise readers with his plot twists. Here’s his answer: “I am basically writing to please myself. The anticipation is that if it works for me, it will connect with enough readers and I’ll be able to make it work. A lot of it is because I have these weird lateral ideas that seem perfectly logical to me, but to other people are surprising. One of my friends has this phrase “The Matt Ruff Non-Sequitur,” where we’re talking about one subject and I will leap over to another seemingly totally unrelated subject where I see the connection but they don’t. I think that’s where the twist and turns and surprises come from, is I have a weird way of drawing connections between different things. Part of the editing process is seeing which of these leaps that a reader will follow and which will be totally bizarre to anyone but me. I’m not trying to be deliberately withholding or surprise people, in fact from my position, by the time I’m writing it I have thought it through and know exactly where it’s going. It’s just that where I see it going is not where anyone else would predict that it would go. I’m just weird.”
