For me the biggest barrier to entry with MURDERS was the Martin and Short of it all. Don't get me wrong, I think they're both hilarious and fantastic. But for me a TV show has to have emotional stakes. And a lot of what they have done together has been built much more around just getting laughs.
As I wrote yesterday, the show does an excellent job of addressing that expectation/question right away. In the first five minutes it's clear, yes, there will be some classic Martin and Short moments here, but also that they and Gomez are each on a personal, human journey. In their own way they're each alone and with a lot of baggage and struggling to find a way forward in their lives.
In the fourth episode the three of them go to visit Cinda Canning, who is basically the true crime podcasting queen. They go there for what is an entirely absurd reason, to get advice on how to interrogate Sting, who they think might have murdered Short's dog (and also maybe the dead guy). And the crime podcast queen is played by none other than comedy goddess Tina Fey. All in all it had me thinking this was going to be just schtick. Maybe good schtick, but still, nothing substantial.
And the scene opens with them all gushing and recalling crazy lengths Canning has gone to for her stories, like being buried for 8 hours in raw sewage. Also their meeting is immediately interrupted by a call to buy her company for 30 million dollars, and it turns out her two assistants are both named Cindy. So yeah, it's all pretty wacky.
But here's the thing: Fey's part is written and performed absolutely straight. You keep waiting for her to join in on the joke, flip us a bit of her 30 ROCK kookiness. And she never does. She takes their belief that Sting is a murderer absolutely seriously and gives them constructive advice on how to convince him to let them question him. It's still funny; she tells this crazy story of baking a turkey for someone in order to get them to let her in. "Who turns someone away who has cooked them a 19-pound turkey?" But it's still on point. It gives them a kind of quest to undertake--what is their version of showing up with a 19-pound turkey?
The scene could have ended there, but it doesn't. Instead writer Kristin Newman adds one more beat. Hearing Martin's character worrying about getting this wrong and making a mess, Fey's Canning stops and corrects him. "Embrace the mess," she says. "That's where the good stuff lives." That's the advice each of them will take into their lives--Martin in his new relationship; Short with his old friend; and Gomez with her own personal investigation. And from a point of view of not just laughs but stakes it's the key beat to the scene. It's the thing that grounds this moment in the bigger and more meaningful story of these characters' personal journeys that we're invested in.
For me the lesson from Newman is Keep Your Eye on the Ball. Every scene has a purpose in terms of plot. Our heroes learn the thing they need to figure out in order to get Sting to let them in. But it also always has a purpose in terms of the characters' personal stories. Our heroes gain an insight that will challenge them to take a risk in their personal lives. When my own writing starts to read boring or off track, usually that means I've lost touch with one or the other of those two purposes. (And FWIW, usually it's the second and much more important one.
If you're looking for an exercise to try, you might take a pilot you've written or one by someone else that you like, and go through scene by scene, writing one sentence to describe the plot move and story/character move of each. And then see what you've got, where it all works well and where something might be missing.
