It's a Sunday Craft Service! Because who doesn't want to talk screenwriting over brunch!
Normally in a film or TV episode you want to give a clear indication early of each character's problem. It locks the audience in, in that it gives them a sense of what they're in for: Destroying the Death Star before it destroys them; bringing down Fred Hampton so the Feds will release you; tanking the National Women's Conference so as to finally stop the Equal Rights Amendment (episode 108 of MRS. AMERICA, which is such a great mini-series).
And so the pilot of FREAKS AND GEEKS has Sam and his friends being bullied right from the opening. This is what they're going to be dealing with, the pilot tells us.
But when it comes to Lindsay, things are a lot less clear. First she's standing up to the bully and trying to hang out with the freaks; that continues for a bit, but then she's confronting those who make fun of the slightly disabled Eli and inviting him to Homecoming--and then that goes bad, and she's fighting off her teacher pushing her to return to her geek roots.
There's a realism to her aimlessness, and as audience we stay with her in large part because she's such an endearing character. But what exactly is her story about? Writer Paul Feig doesn't let us know until nearly the end, when her brother basically asks her the very same thing. What is going on with you?
And out of nowhere we get this incredible story of her being alone with her grandmother when she died, and how frightened she was. Lindsay tries to comfort her by asking if she sees anything, a light or something else hopeful. "No. There's nothing."
And now we get to what's been going on with Lindsay: All the certainty we live with, the sense that things are fine, everything is going to be fine, it's all bullshit. "She was a good person her whole life, and that's what she got." She's trying to figure out how to live with that.
You can't open a pilot on an insight like that. I mean, probably you could, dear writer, and it would be amazing. But the rest of us, that's a moment that is only going to have power if you build to it as a reveal rather than starting from it.
And in doing so, Feig's script shows that it's possible to withhold a character's problem--or at least the clear specifics of that problem--without undermining that character's journey. In fact, the reveal has this magical time-traveling quality to it, drawing our minds back through everything we've seen and casting it in a whole new life.
Linda Cardellini is so good in this. She gives nothing away of the horror Lindsay is going through. With the reveal, suddenly we discover that every moment of the pilot she's been putting on this very brave face.
