Genre: TV Pilot – Drama/Horror
Premise: After the brutal murder of their father, the Locke family move into his old family home, a mansion that is filled with numerous hidden keys.
About: This is a brutal business. Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son, writes a pilot that’s a go at Hulu, the same place that just did a giant deal for a “Stephen King Universe” TV show coming out this summer. But then they turn on him and tell him “No thanks.” If the hottest name in movie and TV properties right now can’t get his own son a guaranteed show, what hope do the rest of us have? — Oh, who are we kidding. If shows like Orville and Santa Clarita Diet are on television, Locke and Key will find a home just fine.
Writer: Joe Hill
Details: 54 pages
A lot of writers complain about the whole nepotism thing. Writers or actors or directors get free passes into the business because Daddy’s already in da club. But would you really want to make it into the business that way? Sure, you get to make a living in the wonderful world of entertainment without having to exert a fraction of the blood, sweat, and tears. But you spend your entire life trying to live up to an impossible bar.
Let’s look at the best case scenario for Joe Hill. You write a book that sells 20 million copies. That’s virtually impossible. But let’s say you miraculously beat the odds and pull it off. Oh, well, all dad did was sell 350 million copies of his books. And it’s not just that. Every time you read a Joe Hill book, you’re comparing him to his father. So nothing you ever write will be judged on its own merit. That’s gotta be tough.
With that said, King is sort of on auto-pilot these days. So when you’re reading one of his son’s stories, you’re at least getting a fresh excited “out to prove himself” voice. But is that enough? I’ve never read anything of Joe Hill’s before so I don’t know. But I’m about to find out.
Locke and Key starts off with a strange girl, potentially a ghost (?), who lives in something called a “wellhouse,” which is like a guest house with no windows? She tells some gawky teenager through the walls that she needs him to find a special key in the main house. He follows her orders for reasons that are unclear, and we watch him walk through the house, looking for this key, while various other keys are revealed to us, but not to him (for example, a key will be hidden on top of a doorway ledge).
He finally finds the key the girl wants but is immediately attacked by a giant door with teeth, and we cut to several months later, where a “school shooter” type kid named Sam walks up to the Locke family’s house, beats the mother, Nina, over the head with a hammer, shoots the father dead, and goes hunting for the other three children, 17 year old Tyler, 7 year old Bode, and 15 year old Kinsey. Luckily, the strong-as-an-ox Tyler is able to overpower Sam, beating him to within an inch of his life.
The Locke family, devastated by the loss of their father, decide to get as far away from this town as possible and forget what happened. So they move into… the Key Mansion we saw at the beginning of the pilot. It turns out that’s the house their father grew up in.
We cut between the family moving into the strange old house, as well as Sam, now permanently maimed from Tyler beating his face in, locked up in a high-security juvenile detention center. Oh! And that girl who lived in the wellhouse? Well, even though she’s still in that wellhouse 2000 miles away, she’s somehow able to talk to Sam through his sink. Uh-huh. The implication is, she wants him to finish the job on the family and finally get her key.
Locke and Key is a primary example of how important it is to understand the craft of screenwriting. I don’t know if Joe Hill has ever written a screenplay or teleplay before, but I’m guessing he hasn’t.
And it’s not even the fact that the prose is overcooked (there are numerous paragraphs that last 10 lines long). I can accept that if the story is good. It’s that there’s zero structure to this pilot.
Take the fact that the best part of the story happens in the first 10 pages. We get a fairly interesting “walk through a haunted house” scene. This is followed by a family getting brutally attacked by a psychopath. But after that, absolutely NOTHING happens. The family grieves. The family moves. The family gets used to their new house. And that’s it! A story is supposed to build. Every five pages it should feel like a big puff of air has been added to the balloon. Then, in the final scene, that balloon must pop. The pacing here is the opposite. With each scene, air is let out of the balloon, making the story less and less appealing.
I suspect that Hill coming from the world of novels is part of the problem. For example, he would occasionally put lines like this in the description: “When she scrapes a match along the friction strip, we see the Inferno Key quite clearly, and that’s good… because in the next episode, Sam Lesser will use this key to escape prison and kill about two dozen people in the process.” You can’t do that. Why? Because any important information must be conveyed to the audience watching the show. This information is only being shared with the reader. That doesn’t make any sense.
Also, any top-level screenwriter would have had this family moving into the house by page 15. Hill doesn’t move them into the house until page 38!!! Not only does this drag the story along at too slow of a pace, but it leaves an awkward amount of time (17 pages) to finish the story. Since we just moved in, it’s impossible to build up a whole new storyline in just 17 pages. This forces Hill to rattle off a bunch of vaguely connected scenes that contain more of a “just get me out of here” feel than a carefully crafted buildup with a satisfying resolution. Now had we gotten to the house by page 15, we would’ve had plenty of time to build a story into the rest of the pilot.
Another problem here is the concept. I’m not sure what it is exactly. A house with a bunch of keys hidden in it? First of all, why would a house have a bunch of hidden keys? There’s no clear logic as to why that would happen. And second, how is that a concept? Is the show going to be about finding these keys? Why do I care about that exactly? A good TV or movie concept is crystal clear the second you hear it. “A family is forced to live in silence as they hide from creatures that hunt by sound.” That idea was worth a 50 million dollar opening weekend because it was so clear. “A family moves into a house that has a bunch of keys hidden in it and there’s a girl who might be a ghost who lives in the adjacent wellhouse who wants one of those keys for reasons we don’t know yet” doesn’t exactly have the same ring to it, does it?
I wish I could get more behind this but I don’t see a concept here. And while sometimes, a well-written show can overcome that, the structure is so wonky in the Locke and Key pilot that I don’t see an execution either. This is the problem with these Hulu and Netflix people. They don’t have anyone in development to get messy pilots back on track. Television is so starved for content these days that I’m sure Locke and Key will find a home. But it needs someone who can guide Joe Hill to a more structured story.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Just because a pilot is one fraction of a bigger story, that doesn’t mean you should use it solely as set-up. A pilot is tricky in that it needs to be its own contained story IN ADDITION TO being the beginning of a bigger story. That means you should treat your pilot like any story. There should be a goal. The stakes should be high. Time should be running out. There should be a climax. And you should top things off with a giant question that intrigues the audience enough that they’ll want to come back next week. For example, the new AMC show, “The Terror.” The whole first episode is gearing up towards these ships trying to get to a safe part of the sea before it freezes over, trapping them there for the winter. That’s the goal. And it culminates in them choosing the wrong direction and therefore getting stuck. That’s the climax. We then get one final question mark – a strange nearby animal has attacked someone. And that’s it. We want to come back for episode 2 to see what happens next.
