A Mic Drop In Character Building
One line entirely changed how I read the next 50 pages of a TV pilot.
Last week, I was doing coverage on a period drama pilot, MDMA, from writer Angie Wang. It's gritty, colorful, and intense. Like if The Queen's Gambit and Breaking Bad had a baby. I know… awesome right?! It's the kind of pilot that rewards close reading — the same economy I wrote about in the 3-for-1 pilot conceit.
On page 7 there's a single parenthetical that changed the entire script for me. Just seven words. Would’ve been easy to skim past. The protagonist is dropped into a room that isn’t home and just before the dialogue line we see, “she begins to mimic their speech patterns.” That's it.
Like I said, seven words. And they changed everything.
It's also, in my humble opinion, doing more character work than most scripts manage in pages of character exposition. She doesn’t announce who this character is. The writing SHOWS it, in real time, in the smallest unit of stage direction a script can offer. Those seven words texture every beat moving forward. Each new world she enters, the voice changes, but the wound underneath doesn’t.
I flagged it in the margin of the coverage before I’d even finished the read. I wrote, “That one little piece of stage direction is worth more than a page of backstory. A mic drop of character building.” And I meant it.
That one little piece of stage direction is worth more than a page of backstory. A mic drop of character building. — from the dev|cut. coverage report
It's the kind of moment that's easy to miss reading fast, and easy to undersell reading slow, because it never forces your attention to it. It just works, quietly, on every page it turns up.
The coverage verdict as a whole was overwhelmingly good. Angie is a fantastic writer and built an extremely compelling world with this script. Yet, this note about a parenthetical is what I keep coming back to. Not because anything was broken, but because something so small was doing something so large, and it would have been easy to read past it without saying so.
That's the difference between a script that tells you who the heroine is and one that simply lets you watch her become it, page by page.
Curious what this level of character analysis would surface in your own pilot? Script coverage pricing.
[Soon] The story continues… — Brian Hanford, Writer & Founder, dev|cut.™ · devcut.io
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