My First TV Pilot: 'And We're Back'
She's messy but she's mine
I spend the bulk of my time here at Lifting Fog — seriously like 95, possibly 97% of it — critiquing other people’s work, whether that’s a song, movie, book, TV show, or flavor of La Croix. When you have as many opinions as I do, a diagnosable condition I have struggled with all my life, this might even constitute an act of emotional regulation! Better out than in, especially when it comes to telling the truth about ‘Ted Lasso’ and his cult of Kindness. In that sense I do think what I offer here should be considered a service.
But sometimes I feel bad about my criticism. Not because criticism’s unnecessary (we need it! In a world of Benson Boones, boy fuckin’ howdy, we need it!), or even inherently mean, but because as something of an artist myself 🤮, I know exactly what it takes to have made that terrible song, movie, book, TV show, or flavor of La Croix. The worst art you’ve ever experienced in your life started with some level of sincere enthusiasm! And not to suggest we should treat artists with kid gloves, least of all CIA plant Benson Boone, just maybe that if you’re gonna shit on something whilst trying to do the thing yourself, well…maybe throw some skin in the game. Maybe show everyone just how terrible you yourself can be.
With that in mind, today I wanted to sack up and share the first TV pilot I ever wrote, ‘And We’re Back’: a comedy about a sheltered New York kid trying to engineer his own coming-of-age story in a small Nebraska town. I’d describe the show as ‘Northern Exposure’ meets ‘Parks & Rec’ meets ‘The OC’ meets me, Henning Barfoed Fog. Very possibly this all sounds to you like the worst recipe imaginable! If so, the post can end here; there is of course no accounting for taste. But if even some tiny part of you is intrigued, well, here is that script in PDF form:
Did you read it? Did you love it? Did you hate it? Let’s talk about it, man, I’ve got four hours until I see ‘Sinners’ in 70mm IMAX.
Bowling sans Bumpers
Now, the last time I did a screenwriting post like this, I shared my earliest TV “spec,” an episode of ‘The Office’ (US) I wrote during the first Obama presidency.
"Favorites": My 2010 'Office' spec script
I’ll write new — maybe even non-TV! — stuff here again soon, I promise, but I’m feeling lazy and when I’m feeling lazy I think “maybe there’s something post-able from the archives,” and because my professional spirit animal is Emily Dickinson, well, I’ve got nothing BUT archives — figurative shoeboxes overflowing with stabs at this or that thing, half-f…
I’m sure I said as much then, but what’s so great about specking1 existing material is… well, the material exists! You already know how the characters sound, what kinds of plots the show typically employs. Literally how it looks on the page, which can inform so many decisions about scene construction, joke density, and pacing. You have a model to return to again and again that eliminates guesswork; all you have to do is, you know, be funny and tell a good story that’s both exactly the show as is and also different enough for your voice to stand out. Child’s play!
Fact is, the job of writing for someone else’s show (like I did on ‘American Housewife’, plug) is really just formalized spec writing. Does that line sound like Katie Otto? Would Oliver find himself in this sort of situation? Did ‘Modern Family’ already do this B-plot, better, three years ago? The bumpers are in place; your job is working within them while not pitching so anonymously as to be forgotten.
Original screenwriting is a lot fucking harder! The bumpers are GONE, they’re making you use an adult-weight ball, they’ve taken away that special contraption that rolls for you. And what you’re left with is… well, a blank white page on which you’re just supposed to toss a bunch of dialogue and action lines and “CUT TO:”s that maybe, possibly, add up to a coherent story. It sucks, which is why I’d much rather talk about Post Malone Oreos.
The challenges aren’t strictly mechanical. They are in fact emotional. Specking an ‘Office’, a ‘Mindy Project’ — it’s not like these assignments are devoid of effort, but they are devoid of real risk. It’s the same territory as my Picasso homage I shared in that Ghibli post a few weeks ago. There’s celebration in every pencil stroke, and cleverness in every Mindy line, but there’s also no threat of exposure! You learn very little about me in the process.
Which, you know, is the point of this whole Art thing.
Who Am I, in 12-point Courier font
All of this is preamble2 to actually talking about ‘And We’re Back’, an idea that first came to me sometime around 2012, then I began outlining in earnest in 2014, then finished a shitty early draft of in 2016, and finally resurrected into the version you did or did not just read sometime in 2020 (which still isn’t even that good!). What’s the point in being a late bloomer if you don’t just all the way commit, you know? My plan is to finish my next project by 2029.
You’ve likely figured this out from four years of posts3 about topics like “why did ‘Aftersun’ move me so much?” and “drinking during COVID” that writing is a form of therapy for me. I think that’s true for most writers who are (‘Bachelor’ contestant voice) here for the right reasons, but you especially feel it when, like I said, you’re writing something of your own. Original storytelling doesn’t just entail coming up with something original; it entails figuring out, like, what you’re interested in; what kind of shit, for better or worse, you’re drawn to. Maybe… who you are.
If you read ‘AWB’, then you’ve already got some ideas to that end! For everyone else: this is a story about Charlie Farish, a ‘This American Life’-loving 22-year-old who’s called New York his home for as he can remember but feels, deep down, that the only conceivable way for him to grow up is to get out — something encouraged by a phantom Ira Glass4 who, acting like Charlie’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, tells him (through ‘This American Life’-speak) that he needs to decamp to a small Nebraska town called Whistler Falls5, where his coming-of-age story can truly begin.
There, he’ll ingratiate himself to a public radio station run by a gruff journalist named Wendy Plainfield and her 20-something daughter Cait, who Charlie assumes — by the logic of coming-of-age stories! — will be his girlfriend but who actually won’t, because she’s gay and asthmatics who can’t change tires aren’t her type, anyway. Narrative expectation will slowly but surely yield to reality for Charlie, who is changed by Whistler Falls and its colorful cast of characters. Think Pawnee, Indiana. Think Dillon, Texas. Think Cicely, Alaska. If you know the shows those fictional places refer to, then you are already ‘AWB’’s target audience!
I’ve written plenty more pilots since then, in exciting new locations (coffee shops! Swimming pools!) and laced with way timelier references, like chicken jockey. But this one is sort of the Urtext; I see… everything here, all my hang-ups and obsessions and strengths and weaknesses (as a writer AND man) laid out, in ways that even years later make me feel a little weird but also like… well, me, which as I said is probably the main unconscious reason I’m drawn to any of these ideas. Because they bring me back to my friggin’ SELF, dude.
You begin to notice patterns in the work. Oh, it turns out I always write characters toeing the line between confidence and complete delusion (🙋🏼♀️). Oh, it turns out every story I’ll ever write involves some version of subterfuge, almost immediately discovered and regretted. Everybody’s chatty, but are they actually saying anything or just talking? Are they all just crying out to be seen in a world that’s bigger and scarier than they want to admit?
Some version of Charlie Farish and Cait Plainfield have appeared in every script I’ve tackled, reincarnated like ‘Cloud Atlas’ characters, just much more poorly written. Charlie becomes Emery Kitsmiller becomes Dash Falkenstein becomes Martie Tuttle becomes Rhonda Civic; Cait becomes Tom Boyd becomes Merritt Singh becomes Candace Wheeler becomes Barbara Claus. In the end, they probably all become God.
As an actual television script… I don’t know, I’ve gotten better since. It’s overlong, for starters (whether network or streaming, I don’t think this needed more than 36 pages) and I’m not sure the “fantasy” elements are all the way clear, visually. Should the action move to Whistler Falls earlier? Do I need at least two more side characters in a pilot meant to introduce a whole world? Is my show about myopia too myopic?
All worthwhile questions to ask if I’m ever called upon to revise ‘AWB’, for money!
In Conclusion
Not that I need to justify the posting decisions that animate my own free Substack, but as I think back on it, my reasons for sharing ‘AWB’ today are probably three-fold:
Like I mentioned up top, it feels important to balance the critical scales when I do no shortage of yapping about other people’s stuff while hiding, too much, my own. It’s fear! Obviously! That you might think I suck, that it will become that much clearer why I’m not currently in a writers room — all those thoughts that permeate someone’s brain, two hours before they go to see ‘Sinners’ in 70mm IMAX. But maybe just POSTING THROUGH IT could serve to prime the creative pump, make me that much looser — not just here, on Lifting Fog, but in the TV and movie work I continue to do6, and want to do more diligently.
Screenwriting, as a vocation, is actually sort of insane: you dedicate yourself to a project for months, sometimes years, under the idle hope that a) maybe it gets made and b) maybe you make some money off it. Should neither happen, you just… move on to the next thing, reseting those two hopes and relegating the now hopeless project to the annals of your computer (this is what we in the Biz call your “portfolio”). Of course, no project is ever truly dead. But in the interim — and barring any sort of NDA/professional expedience scenario, which none of my projects are under — why not share it? I worked really hard on this shit! ‘AWB’ deserves a little time in the spotlight, by which I mean 152 Substack subscribers, at least six of whom have already read it.
Maybe one of you will really love this, so much that you leverage a pre-existing Hollywood relationship and, say, talk to the higher-ups at FX or something on my behalf. Thanks!
Bonus ‘And We’re Back’ content for the real ‘Back’-strokers
If you’re still here, you’re either bored out of your skull and willing to read anything OR you actually did enjoy some of ‘AWB’ and might even want to read some more. If you’re in either camp, well… welcome to the DVD Bonus Features!
I won’t subject anyone to the complete second episode I wrote (episode #102, “Training Day”) because, after looking it over briefly, it’s way too slapdash to share even here, even if I do love this exchange:
What I will share, however are:
‘And We’re Back’’s very thorough show bible, written in 2016, which sketches the entire 22 episode first season, including song selections for each episode. I hesitate to call these episodes “outlined” when usually it’s just a scene or two I’ve considered, and female supporting characters who need a lot more work than 29-year-old Henning understood at the time. But there’s a shape here I really like; I think the tone is clear as day.
The official ‘And We’re Back’ soundtrack, the sonic aura of which exists at the intersection of ‘Friday Night Lights’, ‘Chuck’, and the “stomp clap hey” sounds of the early ‘10s. There’s some Beatles and Tom Petty in here, too, bringing the show’s music budget up to approximately $400,000/episode. My favorite song of the bunch is Kate Bush’s “Suspended in Gaffa,” which will play over a season finale montage of all the ways Charlie’s changed (and been changed by) Whistler Falls. We will not get renewed for a second season.
I’d love for something, anything to happen with this fictional world I’ve spent no shortage of time in over the years. I still think there’s something here! Hopefully, thousands of words into a Substack post about an aborted TV pilot, you do too. But even if nothing ever happens with it, professionally, it remains as clear a distillation of me as I could hope for, and a reminder to keep chasing that clarity in everything I write, and do.
NEXT UP: Four months later, it’s finally time to review ‘The Brutalist’
maybe “speccing,” but that just looks terrible to see it written out that way
the thing I excel at most in the Substacking space
SEVENTEEN, for my Lifting Fog OGs
Clearly a longtime, ongoing obsession
my invention, it doesn’t exist
I just finished a new pilot last week! That I’ll share with you three years from now