Genre: TV Pilot – Horror
Premise: A small town is plagued with a growing number of demonic possessions. The town outcast, who was shunned after claiming to battle these forces as a child, may now be the only one who can stop them.
About: This show comes from Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman. Kirkman, looking to expand his empire, has brought his newest pilot to Cinemax, where it has quickly been picked up to series. The show will star Patrick Fugit, a name many of you may have forgotten. Fugit famously played Cameron Crowe’s version of himself in his film, Almost Famous. One of the nice things about this never-ending TV renaissance is that actors who may have been forgotten forever are being given another chance.
Writer: Robert Kirkman (based on the comic created by himself and Paul Azaceta)
Details: 70 pages (6/29/14 draft)
I don’t know what’s going on here, but something doesn’t feel right. Robert Kirkman has an amazing relationship with AMC. With Fear The Walking Dead arriving soon, he’ll have two hit shows on the prestigious network, making him, probably, the network’s biggest star.
So why, then, did AMC not pick up Kirkman’s Outcast? The guy should’ve been able to pitch it in his underwear while dribbling jello onto his belly and AMC fall over themselves to put it on the air. But that’s not what happened. It was sent off to Cinemax, a channel 70% of Americans believe no longer exists.
The only positive scenario I can imagine here is that so many people wanted the next Kirkman show that Cinemax, in a desperate bid to become relevant, overpaid – gave Kirkman a deal AMC couldn’t match. That’s what I’m hoping for, anyway, since that version of the story means I’m about to read a far better script. And with that, I slide into one of my more anticipated pilot reads in awhile.
Outcast begins with one hell of a disturbing teaser. An 8 year-old boy, Joshua, watches as a cockroach skitters up his bedroom wall. Seemingly in a trance, he SLAMS his head into the bug out of nowhere, smearing the roach into two pieces and then, for good measure, eating those pieces (with the bug still wiggling its last bit of life). Joshua, we’ll soon learn, is possessed by a demon.
Cut across town to Kyle Barnes, who lives in a Hoarders-stricken home that he leaves about as frequently as Rob Kardashian. We find out why that is when his sister, Megan, forces him to join her for some errands. Once out in public, everyone who sees poor Kyle looks at him like he’s the Devil.
Throughout the course of the pilot, we learn that Kyle did something horrible to his wife, who’s since taken their little girl and moved away. That wasn’t Kyle’s first strike either. He also beat up him mom when he was a kid. This guy’s got some issues. Or does he? Might there be something more going on here?
When Kyle hears about Joshua being possessed, he goes to his only ally in town, the gambling drinking Reverend Anderson. Anderson knows that Kyle has a gift – a gift to battle the demons inside of others. And so he brings Kyle to Joshua in the hopes of performing an exorcism.
But when Joshua starts talking directly to Kyle, telling him things about his life Joshua couldn’t possibly know, Kyle realizes that these possessions – with his mother, with his wife, with his child – have never been random. They’re targeted. Demons have been possessing the people closest to Kyle for years, trying to get to him. But why? And what is it that they ultimately plan to do to Kyle?
I’m going to tell you what I liked about this pilot. It’s a character piece through and through. And that’s what a pilot needs to be. It needs to be about characters having deep-set issues that date back years. We need this because we’re about to spend years with these characters ourselves and if their issues (with themselves, with each other) aren’t extensive, then there isn’t a whole lot to explore now is there?
I recently watched the pilot for Showtime’s show, Ray Donovan. You can feel a 9.5 Richter Scale-sized earthquake of conflict between Ray and his father, when the two meet for the first time after his dad is released from prison. There’s just so much pain and anger and history there that you want to stick around to see where it all comes from.
With Kyle we have this whole backstory with his mother, who used to beat the hell out of him. We also have something with his sister, who he apparently saved as a child but who now he doesn’t get along with. We have a history between him and his wife (and daughter) that needs to be resolved. We have an entire town who hates him because of this supposedly terrible thing that he did. Those are a lot of character relationships that need to be fixed!
And I liked how Kirkman set that all up. He didn’t just come out and say, “This is what happened to Kyle!” We meet Kyle in the midst of his recluse lifestyle. We see brief flashbacks of his mom locking him in the pantry. We see him try to alienate his sister. We see the way the townspeople feel about him. But we aren’t given straight answers as to how any of this connects. It makes us want to read on! We want to find out what he did that was so horrible (we eventually find out that he either hit his kid or his wife – but not, of course, for the reasons the townspeople think).
So what didn’t I like about the pilot? That it was a character piece through and through. The character stuff is so heavy here, it starts to get overbearing towards the end. If you thought Rick from The Walking Dead was a downer, Kyle’s got him beat by a country mile. This dude’s had a rough life and he’s not afraid to mope about it!
I don’t know. After awhile it was just like, “We get it. Your life sucks.” However, you could make the same argument about all The Walking Dead characters. A lot of them are acting the exact same way today as they did four seasons ago. I actually stopped watching last season because of that. I was like, “Haven’t we seen all of this already?”
Kirkman has a tendency to slip into monodrama, and that’s why The Governor’s Walking Dead season was the best. It brought out all these new sides of the characters (their personality, their energy), and gave the show some variety for once. Reading Outcast, I’m already sensing they’re going to nix variety in favor of long faces and serious storylines.
With that said, I kind of love the concept here. As I’ve said before, with this new TV world emerging, there are all these subject matters that people only used to use for movies that can now be used for television. That’s exactly what they did with The Walking Dead. Zombies used to be exclusively a movie genre. They made it a TV one. Now they’re doing the same with possession/exorcism. I think that’s smart as hell.
I just wish Kirkman would’ve implied a bigger mythology, a bigger plot. I’m all for intimate settings and character driven material but this IS a genre show and therefore we should get a sense of the bigger picture. Right now the bigger picture seems restricted to this town, which isn’t too exciting. Do I really care if Uncle Billy John Bob gets possessed? Not really. But if I felt these possessions were threatening to spread to nearby towns, maybe even the city, now you’ve got my attention.
As it stands, I’ll watch an episode or two to see where this goes. It has me curious but not hooked. Which sucks cause I really wanted to be hooked!
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I love the 1-2 punch Outcast uses to draw you in. One way to draw a reader in is to introduce a big problem. We get that when we find out Joshua (the little boy) is possessed. Another way to draw a reader in is to introduce a broken relationship. We get that when Kyle and his sister, Megan, get into a fight as soon as they run into each ther. So a perfect way to start a pilot is to introduce BOTH of these scenarios one after the other. Introduce your plot element (the problem) and then your character element (the broken relationship). If you do this well, you’ll have roped us in immediately.
