Get those pilots ready for Pilot Amateur Offerings Week (March 12th). To get your script into the competition, e-mail me the title, genre, logline, and why you think it deserves a read to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Genre: TV Pilot – Cop Drama
Logline: A tech billionaire purchases a troubled police precinct in the wake of a loved one’s murder. The series will explore if the eccentric and enigmatic figure’s cutting-edge approach can fix the broken ways of the blue blood veterans.
About: This script was sent to me with some high praise. It comes from David Slack, who was one of the primary writers on CBS’s “Person of Interest.” David’s been writing professionally for over a decade, starting off in children’s television before moving on to more adult fare like Person of Interest, Law & Order, and Lie to Me. The show will air on Fox later this year.
Writer: David Slack
Details: 60 pages – revised network draft – (January 22, 2016)
Cop pilots are funny. Everybody’s trying to find that angle that’ll allow them to explore this stale format in a fresh way. Last year we had Vince Gilligan’s Battle Creek which asked the question, “What if you worked in a precinct with no technology?” Fox tried out Minority Report, which asked, among other things, “What does crime-fighting look like with near-future technology?” And now APB comes in and asks, “What if you had an unlimited budget and could use any technology?”
It’s a cool setup. An Elon Musk-like cocky billionaire figures he knows how to fight crime better than the government and puts his money where his mouth is. But the more you think about it, the less convincing the concept becomes. It’s not like our billionaire is saying he knows how to do it better. He’s just saying he could do better since he has more money. But wouldn’t the government do better if they had more money also? That’s one of many questions this pilot had me asking.
APB starts off with a couple waking up to a home invasion. As the woman slips into a back room, she brings up an Uber-like app called “APB” that, just like Uber, shows you all the cop cars driving through streets in your area. She texts that she’s under attack, clicks the button, and immediately all cars on the map turn and start driving towards her. Within seconds (as opposed to the 15 minutes you usually have to wait for cops) police drones AND real cops are there to save the day. Welcome to the next level of crime-fighting.
Jump back a few months where we meet Murphy, the “female version of John McClane.” Murphy is the best cop in the worst precinct in the city. But that’s all about to change. Billionaire Gideon Reed, motivated by the system’s failure to save his wife, decides to buy his own precinct, privatize it, and turn it into the most technologically sophisticated precinct in the U.S. They’ll have drones, they’ll have Teslas, they’ll have body armor, they’ll have apps. And in a Bernsandersion move, everyone gets paid 40% more!
For some reason, Murphy isn’t having this (because an overfunded precinct and higher pay are bad things??) and wants a transfer. Despite their huge pay-raise, the rest of the cops don’t like it either. Everybody thinks this madman and his weird ideas are going to fail so they’re waiting for him to get bored and go back to launching rockets into space.
But Gideon not only believes in his system, he’s going to stay here and run it! That’s right. He sets up an office right here in the 13th precinct. As pressure mounts, Gideon sees that he can win over the team by stopping a band of home invasion murderers. Using his 24/7 5K video drones, he monitors the city until he finds out the bad guys’ identities. But he’ll need the cooperation of his reluctant team to put them away. And to ensure the future of his new system: APB.
I don’t know about this one. I feel like Olivia Wilde going up to present an Oscar only to see that my co-presenter has secretly transformed into Ali-G and may potentially say something insensitive (it’s true: Sasha-Baron Coen was not supposed to present as Ali-G!).
My issue here is that I don’t know what this show is. At first I thought it was about a rich guy proving to the government that he could do their job better. But then it morphed into a sort of “Minority Report” show that focused on next-level technology in the police force. That was until a key scene where Gideon insisted they switch their guns from lethal to non-lethal. So was this now a political statement show about policemen and gun control? As I settled into that mindset, Gideon starts doing all these zany things (shooting himself with a tazer to see how it feels). So is this now the cop version of House M.D.?
Not only do I not know what this show is about, but its entire foundation is built on a questionable conceit. It tries to make you believe that throwing an extra billion dollars at policing a precinct ISN’T GOING TO WORK. That using better computers, better gear, better cars, better weapons, and, oh yeah, crime-fighting drones, is going to fail when compared to… an understaffed underfunded uninspired badly run precinct. Am I missing something here? Explain to me how the latter option could be better.
Now I admit, I’ve never been a fan of this “one bad guy a week” cop-show format. It’s too generic for me, too restrictive. I’m such a “Lost” and “Breaking Bad” guy, I keep waiting for the story to bust out of its chains and go off into new unexpected directions. But I don’t think David Slack (or Fox) is interested in that. And I think that’s why the networks are dying. They’re terrified of trying anything unconventional. I can’t imagine how many meetings they needed over at NBC just to agree that Ray Liotta’s character in Shades of Blue could be gay. And Fox used to be the outlier of the networks. They used to take chances. I’m not seeing that anymore.
Even some of the basic TV stuff here was uninspired. When we cut to commercial (the end of an act break), you better leave us with a question we want answered. The question we were left with at the end of Act 2 was, “Will Murphy leave the precinct?” No. She won’t. We all know she won’t because then there won’t be a show. Not only that, but there’s no reason for her to leave. She’s now working at the most high-tech police precinct in the country. Why would you leave that?
I’m not saying every commercial break has to come with a Lost-level mystery-box question (why are there polar bears on a tropical island?). Character-driven questions are fine. But they have to leave us genuinely uncertain about the answer. I’ll copy and paste something MulesandMud said the other day that applies:
So many scripts that I read never bother to create a real sense of uncertainty for the future, and so I never actually wonder what happens next. Without that curiosity, I have no reason to read further.
A dramatic question should never be rhetorical. There should be a real possibility of a different outcome than the way your scene eventually turns out. If readers can’t see a spectrum of possibilities, they have no reason to read further. You, as the writer, need to show us those possibilities.
Say your characters are rushing to diffuse a bomb in your opening scene. For that to be interesting, I need to believe that they might not actually succeed. That means I need to see how the story could keep going if that bomb actually does go off. If I can’t see other outcomes, then it’s obvious they’re going to diffuse the bomb, and all of your suspense reads false.
For example, maybe it’s not the hero who’s diffusing the bomb; maybe it’s his brother, and our hero is feeding him instructions over the phone. Now I’m thinking about what life would be like for this dude if he gets his brother killed, and how brutal that would be, and I’m genuinely relieved when they both survive. A question with only one answer isn’t a real question. Your story path needs to constantly arrive at forks in the road, and you need to show us both paths, then prove to us that you’ve chosen the more interesting direction every single time.
I was thinking that a lot during APB. None of the questions had me uncertain. I was always ahead of the writer. The plot went according to plan. Even the obstacles (an angry sergeant who says Gideon has 24 hours left to prove himself or else) were expected. I was really hoping for something more here. We live in the age of 500 television shows. You can’t get away with decent anymore. You have to push yourself. You have to take chances. You have to do things that are unexpected. Or else you’re going to get swallowed up. Hopefully David Slack and Fox course-correct here. There’s something in this idea. It just hasn’t materialized yet.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You are playing with fire when you cut to commercial after a soft question. You can get away with soft questions in episode 8, when your show has established itself. But not in your pilot, when trigger-happy viewers with a million choices are looking for any reason to watch something else. Think long and hard about every act break in your script. Make sure to put something there that makes it IMPOSSIBLE for your viewer to not stick around and find out the answer.
