ScreenwriterGuy.com

I was recently catching up with the last few episodes of Mad Men. (It’s one of the coolest new shows on the air, by the way… Of all places, it’s on AMC.)  Anyway, they had a line that I thought was fantastic, so I had to write it down.  The philandering creative director at the [...]

OK, I’m not fanatical about checking the stats of who visits my blog. (Well, not as much as I once was…) This morning, however, in a fit of procrastination, I did take a look.  Normally, you can’t tell much about the people who come to your site, beyond an IP address and what part of [...]

So bad. So very, very bad. So very, very, unbelievably, very, very bad. I applaud attempting a musical television show, even if the last example, Cop Rock, pretty much earned itself eternal punchline status. Viva Lauglin, however, features not musical numbers, but characters singing along to the original version of pop songs. Why? Can’t tell. [...]

Writing a new sitcom is really, really, really hard. You have to build an entire world, introduce us to all the main characters, tell a whole lot of jokes, take us through the plot of that episode, and make us want to see more. In today’s world, you get only twenty minutes to do it, [...]

You remember when Dangerous Liaisons came out as a movie, in English, and then it became an obnoxious high school flick called Cruel Intentions? Well, if you found all the spoiled rich kids cavorting in an adultless world believable and interesting in that, you might swallow what Gossip Girl offers. If, on the other hand, [...]

We definitely live in a world where natural disasters turn into fiction faster and faster. While that normally feels ghoulish to me, K-Ville is respectful in its use of the hurricane Katrina aftermath as a setting. Instead, the show manages to explore the issues a bit, its protagonist arguing with his wife over whether to [...]

I’ve complained before about oversized programming, but tonight’s example really pissed me off.

Not everything has premiered yet, but some of the new shows have aired their second episodes. I’ve yet to love anything so much that I want to add it straight away to my watchlist. Here’s my take on the handful of shows I wanted to give a second chance.  Back to You — Kelsey Grammer’s [...]

If the opening minutes of The Bionic Woman are some of the best I’ve seen in a while, the opening minutes of Moonlight are the worst. Scene one: a contrived “interview” giving us the vampire rules in this world. (The interview device is never used again.) Scene two: the vampire in his world, all slathered [...]

In this charming new offering from ABC, we meet Ned, a man who was born with the extraordinary ability to bring things back to life.  In the clunky opening, telling the story of Ned’s childhood, a narrator feeds us all the rules to Ned’s abilities.  He can resurrect people with a touch.  However, if he [...]

Well, that was weird. I’ve been waiting for weeks to bash the premiere of Cavemen. I wanted to jump all over network television for selling out, or for scraping the bottom of the idea barrel. But, oddly, the show doesn’t suck. Huh. Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a winner. It’s about cavemen. At the [...]

I was lucky enough to encounter a fun and challenging writing exercise this weekend. It started with my posting a few months ago of a comedy monologue for women. I mentioned that I would be happy to monologues for interested actors.  Well, a woman named Jenni was going to audition for a musical comedy. She had [...]