After my contest win for “Calamity Jen” earlier this year, I was put in touch with a producer to discuss possible next steps for both the show and my career. One of the first questions he asked was what other pilots I’d written. The answer was none. What pilots was I working on? Uh … I had an idea for one?
I’ve got no shortage of plays I can show off, including one that’s been published and one that was favorably reviewed in The New York Times, but when it comes to TV I’m a bit of a tabula rasa. This can have some benefits, as a lack of history means there’s no bad press weighing me down — kind of like a freshman Senator with no voting record to criticize (yet). But it can also be a potential red flag to industry-types who might wonder — fairly — if my award-winning script is just so much beginner’s luck. It’s like the thing they say about writing a novel: Most people have one good book in them; hardly anybody has two.
So my first task was to come up with some more show ideas and write two more pilots to prove I have the chops. Sure. No problem. First and last scripts of a series are the easy ones, right?
But come up with them I did. The first was “Eleison,” a show about a burned out, alcoholic priest in his early-50s who’s being coerced by the local bishop into performing the worst job in the archdiocese — being installed as the pastor of under-performing parishes with the sole intent of closing those places down. The script pulled heavily from the twelve years I spent working for the Catholic Church, and, to be honest, I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about it. I’ve written extensively about the church for the theater and in a handful of pieces for TheHumanist.com, so it’s pretty well-worn territory for me. But I figured it was the kind of thing I could bang out quickly without having to do any major research on the topic. So I banged.
I was much more excited about the second show. It was an idea I had been kicking around for a couple of years; I’d researched it thoroughly and had even developed most of the major characters and themes. It was about a female scientist who joins a secretive organization known as The Jasons — a real-life group of scientists who meet every summer as advisers to the Department of Defense. I’d originally conceived the show as a straight-ahead, network procedural, but after talking it over with my new producer friend, he advised me that it’s best for a beginning writer to find one genre and stick with it. “Calamity Jen” and “Eleison” were both dark-ish comedies (or dramedies) intended for streaming or cable, so it stood to reason that “The Jasons” should follow suit. So I re-imagined it for the streaming space with a more irreverent point of view and set to writing it.
And it turned out … not great. As it happens, changing the entire tenor of a show ain’t so easy, and the pilot felt very much like a square peg in a round hole. This left me with two pilots that I felt less-than-enthusiastic about, and the sinking suspicion that maybe I really was a one-script wonder.
Then I took another look at “Eleison” and began to think that maybe I hadn’t given it a fair shot. The bones were there, I just needed to flesh it out a bit more.
And, most importantly, I needed an ending.
I played around with about a half-dozen different endings, writing long stretches of dialogue that would all wind up in the virtual trashcan by end of day. The most frustrating part was that I knew where I wanted the episode to go — our priest chooses to defy the archdiocese and save the parish he’s been assigned to rather than destroy it — but I didn’t know how to get there. I needed a catalyst, and I didn’t know where to find it.
I think every writer faces problems like these (certainly every writer I’ve whined to about this script over the past few weeks has been able to empathize). I’ve faced similar issues in the past, and I think I’ve been able to figure out a solution every time. (Was it always the best solution? Who can say? At the very least, the solutions have been serviceable. Maybe that’s enough.) How I’ve come up with those solutions tends to vary. Sometimes the eureka moment happens during a long, hot shower. Sometimes it happens on a run. Sometimes it’s talking it out with another writer. There doesn’t seem to be a one-size-fits-all method for me, which can be the cause of some serious anxiety. The shower thing worked the last time! Why not now?!?!
For this script, talking it out seems to have been what I needed. As of this writing, I have an ending that I … think works? I may need to go back through the script and beef up a couple sections to make it look like “this was what I intended all along,” but I’m, like, 87% sure this ending closes the loop. At the very least, I’m hoping the script is strong enough to demonstrate to all those industry-types that I have a command of the craft and the ability to come up with more than one good idea.
As for the other show? “The Jasons?” Yeah, I don’t know if that’s salvageable. Oh, well. Time to get cracking on that spec script for “Ted Lasso!”
Geoffrey Scheer 