Genre: Period/Drama
Premise: A look at the female perspective in one of the first ever towns in America.
About: If you don’t know Jenji Kohan by now, you don’t know cable TV. She started out by creating the largely successful Weeds for Showtime, then eclipsed the way more highly touted House of Cards to put Netflix on the television map with Orange is the New Black. Now she’s moving to HBO with her most offbeat and challenging show yet, “New World.” Jenji wrote the pilot for “New World” with brothers Bruce and Tracy Miller, who are brand new to produced television.
Writers: Bruce & Tracy Miller and Jenji Kohan
Details: 65 pages (Revised Prep Draft) 1/22/14
Jenji Kohan
I find it fascinating just how far off the beaten path these networks will go for these upcoming television series. But if you’re HBO, Netflix, or AMC, you really don’t have a choice. Everyone’s using your model now – taking risks on unique provocative material – so you’re not the cool kid on the block anymore. In order to maintain your street cred, you have to go one step further. And that, of course, means riskier fare that is even LESS likely of finding an audience.
I love Jenji Kohan. I think she’s a great voice and is one of the best female writers in television. But I’m also a little scared of her. Especially with New World. There isn’t ANYTHING like this on television right now and the reason for that is because Jenji isn’t afraid to push boundaries. At the start, New World looks to be yet another boring documentary-masquerading-as-fiction account of America’s early past. But as you keep reading and finding out how fucked up everyone in this “world” is, you realize this is pretty challenging shit.
The year is 1692. Now it’s been awhile since my 7th Grade history class but I thought that Jamestown was America’s first town. Yet here, our featured town, Salem, is presented as the first city in the U.S.
If you believe the local pastor, Salem is a town rocked by sin. The women are lustful. The men are devious, and this is putting the town at risk of imploding. The sheriff is doing everything he can to keep people in line – even putting cages over the heads of women who gossip, but it doesn’t seem to be working.
15 year old Ann is our closet thing to a protagonist. She’s the daughter of an important man, Thomas Putnam, who’s at risk of losing everything he owns. He bought some land from the richest man in town, but that man is now disputing the sale, and his influence is likely going to win him the matter in court.
Ann, not wanting to end up on the streets and realizing the power of her burgeoning sexuality, uses the soft touch of her hand on a local gentleman’s manhood to coerce him into saying he witnessed the sale of the land in order for Thomas to win the case. We realize that Ann will do anything for her father – even if that same father will take advantage of her in ways that are beyond unseemly.
Meanwhile, across the forest in another village, 17 year old Mercy Lewis is kidnapped by some local Indians and subsequently raped. Then there’s Mary Sibley, who routinely gets a group of girls together to head into the forest, get high on opium, and engage in large female orgies, using anything to make the exploits more exciting, not excluding the occasional broomstick. Then there’s Betty, the pastor’s daughter, who’s going insane to the point where she imagines everyone is a crow.
Although it isn’t entirely clear where this is all heading, you get the feeling that Salem is a town on the verge of collapse if its leaders can’t rein in its people. And if the focus on Betty is any indication, that collapse may go beyond the physical into complete and utter insanity.
So let’s recap what we’ve got here. We’ve got incest. We’ve got underage sex. We’ve got lesbian orgies. We’ve got rape. Throw in insanity and drugs and you’ve got yourself one hell of a TV party.
As cheap as the use of lurid sex may sound, it’s essential for this pilot to work. If this is just going to be another “trying to survive in old times” TV show, nobody’s going to give a shit. You have to titillate. You have to challenge. You have to push boundaries. And really, it was the uncertainty of what fucked up thing was going to happen next that kept me turning the pages here.
That’s because there’s no real plot in this pilot and I’m a little disappointed in Jenji about that. If you look at Orange is the New Black, the pilot has a great storyline to it. An upper middle-class white woman is being sent to prison for a couple of years. That story is laid out for you before you even write a word (the fear of going to prison, the arrival, the scary inmates, the unique aspect of prison life).
New World is plagued by “Billion Character Setup Syndrome.” This is when you write a billion characters into your pilot, leaving you no time to actually tell a story. All you have time to do is introduce characters. And that’s usually boring, unless you can write the best character set-up scenes ever.
Now the leeway that Jenji has is that they’re going to put this on the air no matter what. So she doesn’t have to introduce a plot in the first episode. She can take as long as she wants to set everything up. But for the average amateur writer, I would never suggest this approach. You need to tell a story in addition to setting up characters.
Why couldn’t Jenji, for example, have followed the same model she used for Orange? There’s a boat that comes over from England in this pilot. Why not introduce us to a woman on that boat – maybe she’s posh, well-to-do – and we follow her (like we follow Piper) as she’s brought into this new terrifying foreign environment? That would’ve been the perfect way to introduce Salem along with the people in it.
Luckily, the characters are interesting enough that we eventually become engaged. It took me about half the pilot – but once I got to know everyone, I found them quite interesting. And we do have things happening. A young girl is kidnapped and raped by Indians. Characters are going insane. There’s a squabble over land. I just wish there was a bigger overarching plot to it all.
I will say this for those of you wondering how to write pilots that get people’s attention. Start out by putting MORE attention on character-creation than you would a feature. Remember, these people have to be interesting enough to last 75 episodes. So if you don’t like to do character bios, I’m afraid you’re fucked. You gotta get to know these characters intricately before you write them so that when you finally do put them down on the page, they actually have depth.
If all you know about a character is their name, they will come off as generic. But if, through your character bios, you find out that they’ve been raped by their father since they were seven, I promise you they’ll have an edge on the page. And that edge only grows the more you learn about them.
Once you have your characters – FIND A NEW ANGLE to come at your subject matter with. There is nothing you can think up that hasn’t been covered before by another show or movie. BUT you can still find fresh angles to cover those subjects from. Jenji and the Millers are looking at the New World from the female perspective. That’s the fresh angle and that’s what makes this pilot stand out.
New World is a strange tantalizing experiment, exactly the kind of thing you need to write to separate yourself from the competition. We’ll see if it finds an audience. But whether it does or not, it’s something to keep an eye out for.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Once you find your subject matter for your television show, FIND A UNIQUE ANGLE to explore that subject matter from. I’m not saying you can’t execute the hell out of a generic idea and make it work. It’s been done before. But you’ll more easily stand out if you can find that fresh angle.
