> This is where my one real area of expertise does come in-- I have to grade
> student writing, and when I want to encourage someone who made a valiant
> effort at something, I try very hard not to pile on too many nitpicky criticisms.
See, that’s the difference. You’re talking as a writing teacher grading student writing, and several other posters were talking as if they were story editors deciding whether to accept a script. For a student in a college writing program, a teacher would be justified in saying, “You’ve written a pretty good script and get an A in the course. I’m not qualified to say whether it would be accepted for production, but you obviously have writing talent. You may need to learn more about TV scripts.”
On the other hand, a story editor would be justified in saying, “You obviously have writing talent. This isn’t acceptable as a script for House, though. You need to take a course in TV writing to learn more about the conventions for this genre. You also need to watch the show more.”
Incidentally, another problem I have with the script is that the daughter acts and talks too old to be a 12-year-old.
Good script, Dio. I’m not a professional writer or evaluator. But I do watch House any time it’s on, including reruns. If it were aired, it would have held my interest, and I would post to the thread in Cafe Society.
I have a couple of comments, as well, and if I can have permission to quote from your script, I will.
Too self-referential. This would drag me out of the show. It breaks the fourth wall too much.
House NEVER wears a lab coat. I’ve only seen him wear a lab coat a couple of times. Once was when Vogler was in charge of the hospital and ordered House to wear one. The other time was when he wanted to con one of Wilson’s patients and barged in to do a “consult.”
Also, re: the Wii golf game - obviously, you’re not going to name a specific Wii game, but golf games on the Wii don’t usually require two controllers. Generally, you hold the Wii-mote in both hands and swing it like a golf club. The nunchuk controller wouldn’t be used. But I think only a true games geek would pick up on this, it doesn’t jar me out of the episode like the first two examples do.
It was good for an amateur effort. It was not near to the standards of a professional screenwriter, I don’t believe. I’m impressed Diogenes went to the effort of writing it, but in my estimation, he did not establish that he was nearly as good a TV writer as the folks on strike.
The script is reasonably well put together but none of the supporting cast is employed to good effect, or even very noticeable, save Wilson. The story’s just a little bit too simple for a House episode - it’s got one, maybe two twists too few - and it’s political to the point of being very irritating, more so than House usually is. It’s too wordy, as has been pointed out.
I agree with this. I also think it’s obvious that he didn’t write a production quality script, somewhat deliberately. There were in-jokes for the Dope, some self-referential stuff that was a wink at House tropes, etc. I think he did those things on purpose because it was a fun exercise not meant for actual TV. Treating it like it was sort of ignores that fact.
I somewhat agree with this. How would she know about the ammonia thing? She was a bit precocious and the fact that she could have killed her mother was a bit glossed over. However, I thought it was a clever premise and with a little work, would have been excellent. If Dio were on the House writing team, I bet that the other writers would have helped him with it. He didn’t have the benefits of that kind of feedback.
As for House wearing a lab coat… he was wearing one in the last episode, for no reason. He does sometimes wear one, randomly.
House does not do self-referentiality. Self-referentiality is O.K. for The Simpsons but not for House. That’s another case of an in-joke that wouldn’t be appreciated by the audience.
Rubystreak writes:
> If Dio were on the House writing team, I bet that the other writers would have helped him with it.
I don’t think so. I think that the other writers would have said, “We could fix some of the superficial problems with this script, but it still wouldn’t make a very good show. You’re going to have to try harder.”
That was one of the times I mentioned. Wilson mis-diagnosed the patient and offered to settle with him. House wanted the patient to sue. He knew the patient would have no case and it would be dismissed, thus Wilson could keep his money and would have more for House to borrow. House wore his coat to gain the patient’s confidence when he advised him to sue. It suited him (no pun intended) to wear it for his own personal gain. If House is mentioned in the script as wearing a lab coat, there should be a reason that works out to House’s advantage.
House does do self-referentiality. There was a whole ep that was documentary-style that had a lot of in-jokes. Also, the whole House/Holmes Watson/Wilson is a bit of an in-joke. The show is often very tongue-in-cheek and over the top. You might disagree, but I could dig up more evidence to back up my point.
You don’t think having people to bounce ideas off would have been helpful in keeping characterizations on-track? There’s a cite in this thread that the writing team does just that for each other.
Also, what hajario said. Dio’s target audience was US. A lot of the criticisms of his script seem to come from the fact that he wrote it for us to enjoy, not to go on TV for a multi-million person audience. You might not like it, but I did, and I don’t think it was wrong that he wrote it that way.
I’m coming from the same place as you precisely, but I did not enjoy the script very much. I give Dio a lot of props for following through and actually posting a completed script, and it was certainly much better than anything I could have written, but he should have picked a show that he was more familiar with. It was all too “cartoonish” for my tastes. That said, I think if the script were submitted to a detailed, professional evaluation such as Pochaco started, it could be crafted into a more interesting product.
All in in: a decent first draft that is nowhere near ready for production, IMO.
Wendell, in my experience, you’re 100% correct. I’ve heard my former showrunner give the “were you just NOT LISTENING when we broke? This is SHIT!” speech to experienced writers who came to write for us for an episode or two.
We break episodes as a group, then a writer takes stuff and goes off to write (usually a few days). Showrunner gets it back, reads, then the script gets bounced around depending on what needs to happen with it.
There’s a core team of writers centered around the lead – the showrunner – the rest are guests, often guests who write a lot for us over the years… but they often write for other shows, too, at the same time. So don’t imagine a group of people who live and breathe the same “universe” all the time. Only the hyphenates (the core – the writer-producers – THAT team) and the staff writers (the non-credited slave(s), the team Script Doctor, the continuity guru) are there full-time.
As for everything else with this whole challenge, script, story, whatever: I think it’s time for me to bow out for good. I’m happy to answer industry questions - always have been. I’ve reached my quota on not-so-cleverly hidden barbs.
Nobody thinks the script is without merit, and nobody thinks this it’s exactly like the one Omar Epps has delivered to his home on Wednesday morning. If there’s a disagreement, the fundamental one is, as it is so often, what exactly we’re arguing about.
I say well done, Dio! I agree with some of the criticisms above, disagree with others, and have a couple of my own which I won’t bother mentioning; as I’m not (currently) a writer myself (I used to be, a long time ago. And a somewhat decent one at that… I once got a rejection letter from a fairly large magazine telling me they couldn’t use my story, but the editor had hand-written at the bottom to please try again, and underlined it…).
I’m not too familiar with the show myself, but I thought overall it was an enjoyable read.
Watching a commercial for CSI last night, I was reminded of this thread. It indicated that there was to be the worst killer Miami has ever seen, and to top it off, one of the members of the inner circle of the show gets shot, and might even die.
I’ve seen this very show done at least 10 times before, just under different titles. The paucity of novel ideas is one of the reasons I would suggest that the standard of television writing is pretty low. I don’t watch House, so I don’t know how novel Dio’s script is in that context, though.
I have nothing, really, to contribute to the sundry topics in this series of threads: the writers’ strike, the craft of television writing, how expressing happiness that a two-year-old’s surgery was successful is acting like a “retard”…
Actually, I’m still scratching my head over that last one.
Still, I wanted to chime in and say that I really enjoyed Diogenes’ script. I enjoy House and I enjoyed Dio’s teleplay. Thanks for doing this, Dio.
This whole affair is likely to be referred back to often in future Doping. Diogenes, I hope you’ll leave the document available for viewing for a long time.
And, while I’m here tossing bouquets, I’ll belatedly add that lobstermobster’s brief “episode” was a scream.
The only thing it really lacked was a clinic scene. But they don’t do those all the time anymore, so no biggie. I’ll say this for Dio: he did make House actually quite mean, which the show’s writers keep his toes at the very edge of all the time. It was morbidly satisfying to see him as a partisan bigot on top of everything else.
Fox is broadcasting an old episode of House tonight. Here’s the synopsis from Time Warner:
“Role Model” When Tom Wright, a senator with presidential aspirations, becomes ill, House examines him and finds that the symptoms point toward AIDS, a condition that would squash his career.
Wow. I had no idea such an episode already existed, I swear.
Ironically, I had to scrap my first attempt because I was initially writing an episode about a monk with stigmata and then abandoned it when I found out the show had already done an episode on stigmata.