Earlier this week I more or less finished work on the first of six scripts for a sitcom project I’m tentatively calling “Lucidity”. It’s effectively the pilot. While it probably still needs some more fine-tuning, I’m rather pleased with how it came out. It’s bloody brilliant, in fact – some of my finest work.
However nobody’s going to be able to read it for a while yet.
Before anything can happen with that first script I have to work on the next episode, which I’ve codenamed the Beeb Script. It’s the script that the BBC actually want to see – a mid-series script where the characters and scenario are already firmly established and we can just get on with things without worrying about continuity. Writing the pilot is all well and good, but pilots spend so much time telling you who everybody is and what they’re doing it doesn’t get to devote enough time to where they’re going. That’s what the Beeb Script is for.
Usually a Beeb Script should take place part-way through a series, but I’m currently torn between the second and third episodes in the series plan Adam and I put together for the show. I have a particular fondness for the third episode, which plays with an established sitcom cliché in a very fun way. That said, the second episode looks like it’d be fun as well, although as I’ve reshuffled some of the elements from that episode into the pilot I’d need to seriously rework the structure of the first half for it to work.
Alternatively I can mesh the two ideas together and see what I get. Nothing’s set in stone, after all.
Why do you think episode one should be the pilot if episode three offers a better taste of what the show would be like?
In fact, if episode three stands up on its own, do you need to a set-up episode at all? I’m pretty sure Enterprise lost me by wasting its two-hour opening episode tediously explaining how a bunch of professional starship operators came to be working on a starship. If they’d started on a proper episode I might have stuck around for the second one.
The first episode is, I think, an absolute cracker. It’s good sitcom material and it nicely sets up the premise of the show.
Unfortunately it’s not what the BBC wants to see. Their policy when it comes to script submissions is to send a mid-series episode accompanied by a document briefly outlining the direction the series will take. It’s a bit silly, but there we are.
(I agree with you about Enterprise’ pilot, by the way. Horribly mismanaged.)