Genre: TV – 1 Hour Drama
Premise: The elite special agents of the Investigative Services Branch who are tasked with solving the most complex and heinous crimes committed within the diverse and majestic National Parks of the ISB’s Pacific West region.
About: Kevin Costner is expanding his Yellowstone empire. Not content with his hit show, Costner is doubling down for a more modern exploration of the national park world. This will be Costner’s first ever TV writing credit.
Writers: Aaron Helbing, Jon Baird, & Kevin Costner
Details: 63 pages
It’s a TV Wednesday. Time to get our TV on. As someone who’s spent his only TV time lately watching episodes of Storage Wars, I could use a good show. Let’s see if Costner delivers the In and Out Animal Style burger version of a TV show. I’ll take fries with that, thank you.
Off-Duty ISB (Investigative Services Branch for the National Parks Service) agent Erica Breen is checking out a complaint from a married couple who say a kid broke into their car and tried to steal from them.
Breen finds an old cabin in the Yellowstone National Park area that a family squats in. She heads up to ask if they know anything about this break-in and finds Adele, a white-trashy type, lingering about. As she begins questioning Adele, she spots kids eyeing her sinisterly. And then a few older kids. And then, behind her, a few older kids still. And then young adults. And then adult adults. They seem to be everywhere, lingering in all 360 degrees of the forest surrounding her. As Breen tries to stay calm, they eventually attack. And Breen suffers a horrible violent death.
Cut to a few days later and we meet the rest of the ISB crew, led by 30-something Lincoln Kane and 50-something Cal Foster. They’ve found the body of a dead woman in a lake and are trying to lift her out. While this is happening, they get word that Breen has been missing for a couple of days. Lincoln takes stock of this.
But for right now, the priority is the woman in the lake, and the team is highly suspicious the woman’s ex-husband might be involved. Meanwhile, we meet this nasty dude, Lee, who hikes out into the park with a couple of girls and then shoves them off a cliff to their deaths. It’s one more problem the ISB unit is going to have to deal with. But first, they find a trail camera that recorded Breen’s death. And after witnessing the horrible things the family did to their friend, they stop everything to find and take this family down.
National Parks has the kind of teaser all TV writers should study.
It’s a wonderfully suspenseful scene that follows this out-manned woman observing as more and more people begin appearing around her. The scene takes its sweet time, making us squirm just as much as the poor character. We’re hoping against all hope that she’s going to find a way out. And since I assumed the scene was setting up our heroine, I thought she would figure out a way. So color me shocked when she didn’t.
The reason I want you to study this scene is because I read too many weak TV teasers. Just the other night, I read a teaser where a guy talks to his wife on a phone call in his car. That was it. That was the opening scene of the show! Sure, the scene gave us some insight into the characters and their marriage. But it wasn’t dramatized. It was information. An opening scene without dramatization is like peanut butter and jelly without bread. How do you even get it into your body?
A good way to explore this challenge is by contrasting the first scene in National Parks to the second scene. The second scene is a group of people trying to fish a dead body out of a lake. Technically, there’s something going on here. We’ve got a dead body. We’re not sure who it is yet. You could argue that that mystery creates some drama.
But is it as good as the opening scene was? No. Not even close. The opening scene was turbo-dramatized. This scene had minor drama at best. It’s not like the body was wedged down under a rock in the water that was hard to get to and required scuba divers to go down and release it and then something goes wrong while they’re down there. It’s just logistically getting a body out of a lake.
That second scene is what most writers start their pilot with. Assuming you’re not so clueless that you’re writing that car conversation scene, this second scene, to most writers, feels like it’s sexy enough to start a pilot. I’m here to tell you it isn’t.
If you’re going to start with a dead body scene, it needs to have more going on than simply the logistics of getting a body out of some water. True Detective is a good example of dramatizing a “found body” scene. Here, something much weirder and more sinister took place. Seeing that death scene was uncomfortable. And trying to work out what the killer did and why they did it keeps the scene interesting.
Sorry to go so deep on that but the opening of any script, TV or feature, is so important. And it’s done the wrong way so often I feel it’s my duty to scream from the mountain tops – “THIS IS HOW TO DO IT THE RIGHT WAY!”
Once National Parks gets rolling, it encounters the typical Pilot challenges, namely that you’re introducing a lot of people in a very short amount of space and it becomes hard to remember who’s who. And in more severe cases, there are so many characters that it’s hard to know who the main one is. That’s an issue I had for a while here. I was halfway in when I realized Lincoln was the show’s main character.
I think the reason this happens so much in TV Pilot scripts is because most pilots are written to be made (as opposed to be sold). So they’re not as worried about readers not knowing who’s who. In their mind, that will be taken care of in the casting.
However, it’s good practice either way to make your characters different from one another. The more you can make them stand out on the page, the more distinct the characters will be on the screen. Unfortunately, I don’t know many people willing to go the extra mile to get this right. And National Parks suffers a little in that department.
But the pilot has enough going for it that I was into it until the end. Besides my desire to get justice for poor Erica Breen, it was fun to see the investigation for the second lake murder unravel. Overall, National Parks does it right. It finds a lane in the TV procedural that hasn’t been explored before then makes sure all its major plotlines could only exist in this unique environment. Worth the read!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I Learned: Not taking into account reader assumptions – Often times, we get so wrapped up in our stories that we start assuming the reader knows everything we do. Where this becomes a problem is during major scenes or important plot beats. If you overlook reader assumption, your reader could end up reading a completely different show than the one you intended. The opening scene of this pilot has a group of people killing ISB Special Agent Erica Breen. We then cut forward in time (we’re told it’s been a couple of days) and a bunch of ISB agents are pulling a dead woman (who they can’t yet identify) out of a lake. You tell me what the average reader is going to assume in this moment. 99% of them are assuming the dead body is Breen. One of the agents even gets a call that Agent Breen went missing a couple of days ago. However, it turns out this is a completely different woman and a completely different scenario that led to her death. It took me another four pages to understand that. And that’s something you don’t want the reader to misunderstand. I know it was obvious to the writers that these were two totally different women. But you showed us a woman getting murdered then cut to a dead woman in a lake. Under what circumstances would we NOT connect the two? You either have to rethink putting these scenes up against each other or be VERY CLEAR that two totally different things are going on.
