Genre: TV Pilot – Drama
Logline: The show follows a troubled couple involved in the disturbing depths of the Los Angeles psychic community.
About: Last night Hulu debuted their Stephen King adaptation, 11-22-63, and if you think it was just another Hulu original, think again. When you get a Stephen King book produced by JJ Abrams starring a movie star, you’re announcing to the industry that you’re an official player. Netflix may be the bully on the block, but that doesn’t mean you and your big wheel gang can’t control the alley. One of their next big shows is Shut Eye, which features Burn Notice star, Jeffrey Donovan. It was created by Les Bohem, who came out of nowhere and landed a huge deal with CBS for his creation, Extant. Among the producing team is Melissa Bernstein, who of course worked on Breaking Bad.
Writer: Les Bohem
Details: 59 pages
TV is at a crossroads. Despite everybody and their daughter-in-law throwing their pilot scripts into the mix, we haven’t seen any breakout shows in awhile. It reminds me of the time when $300 video cameras started hitting the market and all you heard was, “Now anyone can make a movie!” And so everyone DID start making movies. And none of them were any good. Or the reality TV craze. Remember that? When you could say, “What about a dating show… with midgets,” and a network would give you a couple million dollars to play with?
I guess it makes sense. These networks and streaming services have to put SOMETHING on the air. But quality control seems to be at a minimum. Even streaming titan Netflix has a bit of a “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks” mentality. I think this speaks to just how difficult TV writing is. You don’t get to wrap everything up in 90 minutes. You’re responsible for keeping it going… and going… and going… I loved the first season of Orange is the New Black. The second season was an absolute disaster though. You could feel that the writing team had run out of ideas. Ditto the disastrous third season of House of Cards.
To be honest, if you keep a rapt audience past season three, you’re probably a writing genius. I don’t know where Shut Eye will end up in this discussion, but I know that its pilot is pretty good, and pretty damn weird too.
40-something Charlie Haverford is a psychic in Los Angeles. He lives with his cunning wife, Linda, who also works in the business. Charlie’s pretty good at what he does, predicting infidelity left and right, but there’s a sadness to him that belies a man looking for more. Is this really what he’s going to spend the rest of his life doing?
A lot of that comes from Linda, who’s clearly unhappy with their situation. And as we get to know these two, we realize they’re more wrapped up in the psychic community than we thought. Charlie owns a number of small outfits throughout the city, and is responsible for training and keeping those outfits kosher.
If he doesn’t, he has to answer to Fonzo, who’s like the drug kingpin of Los Angeles psychics. He’s in charge of everything. And because of his deep gypsy roots, he deals with problems a little… differently. When Charlie’s psychic sister, Sylvia, tries to con someone, Fonzo has her go through a humiliating ritual where all the other psychics spit on her and call her names.
Things get weird when Charlie gets into a scuffle with the boyfriend of one of his own clients and he bumps his head. Later that day, a hypnotist comes to Charlie and Linda for a job interview. The hypnotist puts Charlie under and something about the combination of the head bump and the hypnosis changes him. All of a sudden, Charlie starts seeing things before they happen. And that means, in a profession of con men… Charlie has become the real thing.
Whoa. This one was out there. You never knew what was coming next. And most of what came next was good. The best way I can describe it is, imagine if a really talented writer got really drunk and let himself go. We’ve got spooky ass seance sessions, weird psychic kingpins, a deeply troubled marriage, bizarre sex scenes, humiliating gypsy rituals, the ability to tell the future. It was like jumping on top of a bucking bronco and not stopping for 60 minutes.
I just wish it all connected more naturally. For example, we meet Charlie in a session and he seems to be honest about what he’s doing. There’s no indication he’s conning the person. So, in my mind, he’s the real deal. However later, he gets the head bump and hypnosis and starts seeing into the future. So now he’s… more the real deal? Or does that mean he wasn’t the real deal earlier but now he is? There were a lot of little things like that that weren’t clear.
But what I liked about Shut Eye was a) it introduced us to a world we knew nothing about and b) it was hella well-researched. From the sessions themselves to the cabal like network that linked all these psychics together – it felt like this is what really goes down. And I’m fascinated by psychics. So each page was like candy to me.
I do want to air a grievance, though. Weird sex stuff can become a crutch for writers of dark material. As storytellers, the ideal situation is that we come up with a plot beat or a character moment to keep the story compelling. In Ozark, when we find out that the main character’s partner has been secretly siphoning money from the drug kingpin, that’s a nice plot beat that adds another layer to the story and pushes it in a new direction.
But when we can’t think of those moments, we go to our trick-box. The trick-box is full of things that don’t require connective tissue to work. You can throw them in anywhere and they’ll titilate or surprise the reader. But the truth is, they’re tricks – a distraction to hide the fact that you haven’t figured out something else in your story.
Throwing in a weird sex scene is a trick-box move. Here we jump into this scene where Linda is beating the shit out of Charlie while having sex with him and while I guess it had a teensy bit of setup, it felt isolated and too much like a trick. You see the same thing in bad horror films. Show something really gross and fucked up that has no connection to anything. Audiences above the age of 12 are pretty keen at spotting these manipulative moves. So beware of the trick-box UNLESS your trick is tightly woven into the plot.
Despite that, Shut Eye achieves what very few scripts these days do – It brings you into an unfamiliar world and unravels in an unexpected way. For those reasons, I found it enjoyable.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’ll give you an example of how to use weird sex stuff without resorting to your trick-box. In one of my favorite films, The Sweet Hereafter, there was a high school girl who’d survived a bus accident that killed most of the other kids on the bus. It unfortunately left her in a wheelchair. Midway through the movie, we learn that, before the accident, the girl had been sleeping with her father. It’s the classic “shocking sex scene” that could’ve easily been a trick. However, late in the movie, the father is part a group suing the bus company for millions. And everything will come down to his daughter’s testimony. Now since the daughter is in a wheelchair, her father is no longer interested in her “in that way.” So guess what happens when the girl testifies? She makes sure to paint the accident as no one’s fault so that her father doesn’t get the money. You say how the shocking sex stuff WAS AN INTREGAL PART OF THE STORY? That’s why it works. But had they just inserted incest sex in there to be shocking and that was the last we heard of it, it would’ve been a trick.
