An excellent resource for how to write a pilot script
For any of you writing pilots, I want you to watch the pilot episode of Your Friends and Neighbors. I’m not saying it’s the greatest pilot script ever. There were aspects of it I didn’t like. And, if I’m being honest, I don’t know how the overall concept is going to last (how many houses can you steal Rolexes from before the viewer gets bored?). But the writer, Jonathan Trooper, nails the basics of what you need to do to write a good pilot.
You see, whenever I read pilots, I’m looking for two primary things for the writer to get right. One is the characters. TV *is* character so we’ve got to have at least 5 compelling characters to care about. And two is plot. You have to create a plot that actually keeps the story interesting.
Sadly, when I do TV pilot consultations, 90% of the pilot scripts achieve neither. I’m lucky if I come across a pilot that does one. But if you want to be a professional TV writer, you have to be able to do both. And that’s where Your Friends And Neighbors comes in.
The show follows a guy named Andrew Cooper, a financial worker who makes gobs of money for his firm, enough to afford a giant house in the suburbs of New York, where he lives with his beautiful wife and two children. Well, where he *lived* with his beautiful wife and two children. One day, he came home and found her having sex with his best friend. She then left Andrew for the friend and now Andrew is alone.
To make matters worse, Andrew comes into work one day and is fired by his boss, who says he’s being let go because he had sex with a subordinate, a strict no-no at the company. Since Andrew will not gain access to his clients, per a work agreement, for another 2 years, that means Andrew has no income. Not good when your bills amount to 100 grand a month. So Andrew, who now rents a smaller house in the neighborhood, resorts to sneaking into his neighbors’ houses and stealing stuff, like watches, wads of bills, probably paintings in future episodes. That kind of stuff.
The most common mistake I see in pilot-writing is that the writers place all their focus on setting up their characters, to the point where no plot can emerge. It’s basically an extensive 60 page character list. Writers often feel confident about these pilots because it takes a lot of work to conceive of 7-10 characters and naturally set them up in the story. So it feels good when you do it. But what they don’t realize is that it’s not enjoyable to read a bunch of, “And here’s this character, and here’s this character, and here’s this character, and here’s this character.” Those characters need to be brought into a story that’s entertaining us.
That brings us to plot. Every once in a while, I do read consult pilots that have the opposite problem. They’re all plot and very little character. These usually come from feature writers who are writing their first pilots. Features are way more plot-driven so, naturally, the writers are bringing that spirit to their pilots. Like I’ve been alluding to, however, you want to do both.
Enter Your Friends and Neighbors. This show sets up a solid 10 characters and always stays entertaining. That’s a very key point I want you to ingest. Character introductions often slow stories down. So you have to carefully balance introductions with plot movement. Best case scenario is that you introduce a character AS THE PLOT IS MOVING ALONG. But it’s not always possible. Sometimes, you need to stop the story so you can say, “Here’s a new character.”
An example of this would be the character of Samantha in Your Friends and Neighbors. Samantha is a neighbor who’s separated from her husband who Andrew has a sexual relationship with. The scene they introduce her in has no plot movement whatsoever. She comes over, they have sex, they bicker afterwards, and she leaves. Tropper needed to introduce that character at some point, so he stopped the story to give her a scene.
So yes, it’s okay to do that. Just make sure that the next scene moves the plot along. What you want to avoid is a bunch of character introduction scenes mashed together without any plot movement. Unless they’re all the most amazing characters ever, I promise you that the reader’s going to get bored.
What is the plot in the Your Friends and Neighbors pilot? It’s a classic 3-Act structure. We establish Andrew’s life in the first act. He’s fired at the beginning of the second act. This forces him to try and figure out what to do. That’s his second act purpose. And the third act is him committing to stealing from his friends and neighbors.
But just smacking down a 3-Act structure does “take care” of your pilot’s plot. All you’ve done is lay the framework. You now want to get into that frame and PLAY. You want to bob and weave and introduce positives and negatives, and twists and turns. You want to keep the viewer on their toes.
The opening scene has a young woman hitting on Andrew at a bar. Andrew, out of boredom and maybe loneliness, sleeps with her. That becomes the reason his boss, later, fires him. Because this woman worked in an adjacent department at the firm and was technically his subordinate.
A character acts. There are repercussions for that action. That’s plot.
The “play” part comes in later. A desperate Andrew shows up at his old work in the morning, cutting off the girl he slept with as she’s walking into the office. He begs her to recant her complaint. She looks at him sideways. “What are you talking about?” She says. “I never made a complaint.” And now we realize that this goes deeper. Andrew storms in, confronts his boss, who’s elusive about the whole thing. But the point is, there’s more to this story. And that’s a great way to think about plotting. You want to introduce developments that announce, “There’s more to this story.”
In between the scenes that make up that plotline, we’re meeting the ex-wife. We’re meeting the kids. We’re meeting his mentally troubled sister. We’re meeting the friends and neighbors he’s going to steal from later. Tropper does a really great job with that balance. If we meet a new character, the next scene will be plot. If a scene is all plot, the next scene we’ll meet a new character. And then, occasionally, he’s able to include both (plot advancement, character introduction) in the same scene.
It all adds up to a seamless story and, therefore, a professionally polished pilot, the kind of production companies happily pay writers to write because there aren’t many writers who are good at it.
Your Friends and Neighbors is on Apple TV+. Have a watch and let me know what you think.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Try to add conflict to your character introduction scenes. Like I said above, a lot of character introductions are kinda boring. The main character usually gets a sexy character intro (Andrew has a 3-page monologue with the girl who hits on him in the bar about the struggles of becoming successful while raising a family). But once you get past the 2-3 biggest characters, you often just have to introduce characters to get them in the story and it’s not always the most entertaining scene. But, you have a secret tool at your disposal to make the scenes at least A LITTLE MORE entertaining. And that tool is called “conflict.” Take the scene with Samantha, the separated woman Andrew is sleeping with. Tropper introduces CONFLICT into the post-sex scene where she gets pissed at him because he wants to sleep alone. It’s not the greatest scene. But it’s better than no conflict. It’s better than everyone being peachy and boring and perfect. So use conflict to spice up your character intros. That’ll keep us satiated until we get to the next plot beat.
