Genre: TV Pilot – Drama
Premise: A Maine-based lobster fishing family who has fallen from grace, finds a chance at redemption when their old fishing boat comes back up for sale.
About: Every year, AMC takes its six best potential scripts and allows their writers/creators to pitch them and the entire show in a more extensive format, via visual aids, or whatever else they can think of. Whoever still looks good after that gets a show on the air. This sounds like a good approach, but doesn’t always work. One of the shows to come out of this format was Low Winter Sun, the depressing took-itself-too-seriously bore fest. The strangely titled “F/V Mean Tide” (I don’t know why you’d put a forward slash in a title. – Unless “F/V” stands for “final version” maybe??) is another one of those scripts. You’re probably wondering, why did you pick this to review, Carson? Well first of all, I trust AMC. They have their misses (as documented above) but as far as alternative TV series, they’re right up there with HBO and Netflix. With that said, their line-up is getting old, with the exception of maybe The Walking Dead, which could conceivably go on forever. So they need some new juice in the fridge. Writer Jason Cahill has written for Fringe, The Sopranos and ER.
Writer: Jason Cahill
Details: 58 pages – 3rd draft
George Clooney to play the father? Hey, more and more film guys are moving to TV and it’s a great role. Why not??
One of the frustrating things about reading so much material is getting bored with so much material. Everybody’s pretty much writing the same stuff with the same characters with the same plots. It starts to depress you actually! But after awhile, you start to realize that you’re part of the problem. If all you’re going to read are sci-fi scripts and thrillers and rom-coms, you’re not going to find much variety in the writing. If you want to experience something unique, you have to take chances, read some offbeat things that don’t necessarily sound like slam dunks. Personally, I’ve never heard of a script based on lobster fishing, so I said, “Hell,” why not.
“Mean Tide” follows 29 year-old Matt Aegis, a lobster fisherman with a complicated past. When we meet Matt, he’s relegated to pulling up traps for an asshole captain whose alcoholism is so bad, he still tries to navigate his boat when it’s tied up to the dock.
For this reason, Matt wants his own boat to captain, but boats cost money, and he doesn’t have much. It just so happens, however, that one of the oldest fisherman in town is retiring and selling his boat. The boat is ancient and doesn’t come close to the technology on these new boats (that find their fish via fancy satellites), but Matt has a secret plan for finding lobster that the most cutting edge technology in the world can’t compete with. We’ll get into that later.
The irony is, the boat Matt wants to buy actually belonged to his father, who lost it because of some fucked up criminal thing that happened in the past (the thing that no one shall talk about!). Before that, Matt’s family was looked at as Gods. Their great great grandfather practically built the town. But nowadays, those looks of awe have turned sideways, to the point where the only people the owner of the boat refuses to sell to are, you guessed it, Matt and his family!
Now it wouldn’t be a show without a few pretty ladies to look at and we got ourselves some doozeys. Even though Matt’s taken with the local tomboy hottie, he gets swept up in the arrival of a mysterious new siren of a female who oozes sex. It’s like if Kate Upton and Kim Kardashian decided to have a baby. All the other fisherman warn him, however, that this wannabe mermaid is well known for banging men and making them disappear. If he knows what’s good for him, he’ll keep his pincers in his pants. Matt lives life on the edge of the bow though, so the pincers come out.
So what’s Matt’s ultimate plan if he does get that boat? Ghost Trees. It’s a spot out in the ocean that’s a shoal forest. Lobsters are hanging out there in the thousands. But everyone’s too scared to go near it, less the shoals rip their boats to shreds. Not Matt though. He’s the only man willing to take the risk. First Matt’s got to get the actual boat though, and not be chomped up by this femme fatale. If he can do that, he and his family just might rise to prominence again.
So did the big risk pay off? Did reading a script/pilot that I would normally never read result in reading euphoria?
Not exactly. But that doesn’t mean I regret reading Mean Tide.
Here’s the thing I continue to be reminded of with scriptwriting. In the end, it’s all about the characters. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing about. As long as the characters are interesting, you’ll pull the reader in. There are some catches to that, of course. You have to create an idea that continually puts those characters in interesting situations so that the characters will stay interesting. But for the most part – it doesn’t matter what the setting or idea is. If you write great characters, people will enjoy your script (or movie, or TV show).
Here’s the caveat though. Nobody’s going to find out about your great characters unless people want to read your script (or watch your movie, or see your TV show) in the first place. This is where concepts come into play. You have to have somewhat of an interesting concept to trick people into checking out your show (or movie, or script) in the first place so that they can fall in love with those characters and keep watching.
This wasn’t always the case. TV didn’t used to be like film, where concept is king. You could focus a show on something simple, like the ER section of a hospital, and you’d have a hit. But I think that’s changing. Mainly because TV is getting so big and all this new material is flooding into the medium. With all that material, the only way to stand out is similar to the way writers stand out in the feature world – a cool concept. It’s why shows like Extant and The Blacklist and The Walking Dead are getting picked up. Even Breaking Bad has a nice little ironic hook (a dying chemistry teacher is forced to cook meth to provide for his family).
To that end, you’re going to get a lot of gun-shy executives when they’re faced with shows like “Mean Tide.” It is fairly interesting subject matter. And the characters are deep and multi-faceted. But it basically comes down to that age-old screenwriting truism: The smaller the hook, the better the writing has to be. If you’re going to write about families in suburban America (zero hook) the writing has to be perfect for the movie to be made (American Beauty). The hook here is kind of small – lobster fishing – and I’m not sure the story is good enough to make up for that.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot of good here. I love how the pilot is structured like a feature (Matt’s got 3 days to come up with the money to buy the boat — goal! stakes! urgency!). I love how the family is presented as an underdog, so we immediately like them. I liked how nobody was perfect (Matt’s dad has a wayward eye and is unloving towards his son). I liked the conflict (every single relationship was steeped in some kind of history, making for plenty of conflict and subtext). And I loved this looming dangerous gold mine that was the Ghost Trees. I loved that everybody else was afraid of it except for our main character. Made him heroic and kept up the suspense, as we wanted to see if he’d be able to navigate it and reap its rewards at the end (the dangling carrot that kept us reading til the end).
But the story never really built enough. It kind of stayed at an even keel. And there was this annoying voice over from Matt that ran throughout the entire script that was totally unnecessary. It was one of those voice overs where the main character is trying to sound thoughtful and philosophical as he describes the events and people and history of the town. But it comes off as pretentious. I hate voice over that, if you cut it out, wouldn’t have any bearing whatsoever on the story. And that’s the kind of voice over this was. If you got rid of it, nothing changed. That’s the very definition of unnecessary.
There’s no question Cahill is a good writer but this pilot is missing something and I’m having a tough time figuring out what that is. Is it that the concept’s too small? Are we missing a twist or a big plot point to give the middle section a jolt? That may be it because I was never really surprised by where the script went. I felt like I was ahead of it. As a writer, it’s your job to be ahead of the reader, not the other way around. But anyway, while this was a strong pilot, until that something extra is found, it probably won’t be ready for television.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: To find a goal that results in the story for your pilot, create a problem for your main character. From problems emerge goals. So here, Matt is frustrated as shit with his current job as a 3rd Fisherman on some trawler boat. That’s his problem: he doesn’t want to be doing this anymore. So when a new boat comes up for sale, he sees an opportunity to fix that problem. His goal (which emerges from the problem) is to get the money needed to buy the boat within 3 days. The problem leads to the goal which leads to the framework (or structure, or blueprint) of your story.
What I learned 2: AMC’s “Top 6 scripts” approach reminded me that every production house or studio or network is basically a writing contest. You’re entering their contest and the winner gets to be on the air (or in a movie theater). The difference between this contest and contests like the Nicholl or Page, is that instead of competing against amateurs, you’re competing against pros, writers who understand story and characterization and dialogue and structure. The competition is a LOT LOT better, so you really have to knock it out of the park if you want to “win” that contest.
