Halloween Week continues on with the highest horror concept we’ve seen all year. But is it too much for the writer to handle??
Genre: Horror – 1 Hour TV Pilot
Premise: (from Blood List) A controversial high tech company pays the dying to keep their spirits alive in their homes after they pass so they can market these ‘haunted houses’ to high-paying visitors (think haunted Airbnb). Heathcliff Gill is a recruiter for the company who begins to realize the immortality he’s selling isn’t as blissful as he thought.
About: This pilot finished on the 2017 Blood List.
Writer: Tim Macy
Details: 62 pages
You know what I miss most about the old spec days? The fun ideas. The creative interesting fun concepts that people used to come up with. You’d have your Jurassic Parks and Con Airs, a new time-travel spec sale every week. Nowadays, you’ll be lucky if you see a handful of those a year. You’re more likely to sell a biopic about the guy who invented the clock than the next Terminator.
So when I see concepts like this one, I smile. How do you get more high-concept than “Haunted Airbnb?” And TV seems to be where these ideas are going right now. Between shows like Russian Doll and Living with Myself, TV is ironically embracing something they used to hate – the high concept pitch.
But the challenge with high concept ideas remains the same. There’s a threshold for how far you can push a concept before the audience doesn’t buy it. “Cowboys and Aliens” for example. People looked at that and said, “Uh-uh.” Today’s pilot walks that line so precipitously, that you think it’s going to fall at any minute. Yet somehow, some way, it makes it all the way to the other side of the canyon.
Heathcliff is a recruiter for a company called Entity. Entity has figured out how to scientifically capture the soul of a human as they pass away. Seeing as this is America, they then went about monetizing the idea.
If you’re going to die soon, you can sign up with Entity and they will capture your soul and keep it in your home forever. Why would anyone do this? Because people will pay big bucks to stay in houses with ghosts in them. And the family will get a cut of these profits for as long as they’re alive. So if Walter White had existed now instead of ten years ago, he may have chosen this to help his family as opposed to making meth.
Entity has fought numerous lawsuits to keep this process proprietary. Even the government doesn’t know how they do it. The rules are that you rent a house for a day and get to experience real live ghosts. No phones, no cameras, no video recorders. You can’t tape anything inside these houses.
Naturally, there are a lot of people who don’t like what Entity does. There is an ongoing 365 day protest in front of their headquarters, telling them to stop stealing Heaven from these individuals. So Heathcliff has to be careful about who he reveals his profession to. If he’s in the wrong part of town with someone who doesn’t like Entity, he could be in deep trouble.
The pilot focuses mostly on Heathcliff battling for “employee of the year” with his recruiter nemesis in the company. Time is running out and whoever can recruit one more individual by the end of the month is going to win. Which is why Heathcliff isn’t as meticulous as he normally is when a middle-aged gentleman named Alfred Kind contacts him and says he wants in.
Heathcliff speeds through the normally elaborate process, and therefore misses a key detail. That Alfred Kind isn’t sick at all. He’s duping the system, covertly committing suicide. But why? We find out later in the episode when the now dead Alfred spirit receives his first “Haunted Airbnb” customers. As soon as he has them in his house, he proceeds to murder them. End of episode.
Okay okay.
I can already hear what you guys are saying.
This is a totally ludicrous idea! Carson, are you insane? Have you lost it?
Maybe.
To be honest, these pages got a lot ‘come on, really?’ looks from me. The government wouldn’t have any oversight on a company that kept human souls alive? The person’s family has to leave the house and can never come back and see their loved one’s soul again? Not even for a day?? If you sign up for an experience, they lock all the doors from the outside so you’re stuck there til morning? I mean come on. There isn’t a Fire Marshall in the whole of the United States who would okay that one.
Heres’ the problem Heartbeat runs into. And it’s a problem I see quite often in screenplays. When you’re creating your mythology, the more rules you have to put in place for it to make sense, the more spots there are for the logic to fall apart. This is why I tell everyone to MAKE YOUR RULES AS SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE. The more convoluted your rule-set gets, the more holes there are springing leaks.
Heartbeat has to spend its first 15 pages (one scene with Heathcliff trying to sign up a family and one scene where the president of the company is answering questions from the press) on exposition. That’s a good sign that your rule-set is too complicated.
However, there is an addendum to this. And it’s the same thing that occurred in The Matrix (**this is a Scriptshadow warning – Matrix reference incoming – you have been warned**). If the exposition is exposing something interesting, people will allow it. The Matrix has 20+ pages of exposition about The Matrix and yet it’s all so cool, we don’t care. Heartbeat is no Matrix. But I was oddly mesmerized by this idea that people were selling their souls, literally, to become ghosts. Even when the logic became outlandish, I still liked the core idea.
And the most important thing is that I wanted to keep reading. Remember, that’s all that matters in the end. With any script. If the reader wants to keep reading, you’re winning. Specifically, I knew Entity was doing something shady and I wanted to figure out what it was. And I knew that Alfred had something up his sleeve and I wanted to find out what that was. Those two threads combined with the unique premise kept me engaged.
My next question was, is this a TV show? Does it have the longevity to be extended out over a number of seasons? I don’t see how it does. I can see a thread where Heathcliff learns that the company is lying and doing something nefarious (my guess is that they’re picking people ahead of time and working with doctors to give them fake terminal diagnoses) but once that’s revealed, where do you go?
This goes back to the difference between how you approach a feature compared to how you approach a pilot. With a feature, you will almost always start with plot. With a pilot, you should start with character. Specifically MULTIPLE CHARACTERS. You do this so that 5-8 characters in your pilot begin this journey with unresolved problems. That way, when someone finishes reading the pilot, they’ve got the unresolved plot to imagine going forward, and they’ve got 8 unresolved character journeys to imagine as well. This helps someone believe that a pilot can last for lots of episodes.
In Heartbeat, the only person we truly get to know is Heathcliff. And then Arthur, sort of. That’s 1 and a half characters. So, naturally, when I try and imagine future episodes, I don’t have much to imagine. That’s a big thing when producers and networks read a pilot. They need to be able to imagine future episodes.
Now, of course, the length of TV shows has a lot more flexibility these days. But most people are still looking for that lucrative multi-season show because those are the shows that make the most money. And Heartbeat doesn’t feel like that.
With that said, it’s a fun concept and a fun read. I blew through this fast and still cared at the end. That says a lot about a script and why I think it’s worth checking out.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Unless you’re writing one of these 6 episode – 1 season streaming shows, you shouldn’t focus your story around a single character in a TV Pilot. You’re better off cutting between a full cast of characters. This will give your pilot the meat necessary to convey a long-running series.
