Over the holiday I finally listened to all the people who kept saying FOR ALL MANKIND is a great show and ended up devouring the first season. This week I'm going to talk about some of the things I discovered there, starting today with a great character introduction.
If you don't know the show, the premise is basically, What if the Russians landed on the Moon first? How would that affect the American Space Program (and lots of other things, too)? In its first season the show focuses entirely on the astronauts and staff of the Apollo program. And after the introduction of the various astronauts and their wives and this new world in which they failed to get to the Moon first, we meet Margo Madison, an engineer who works for the program but is largely ignored, because OMG she's a lady, what would she know?
And she's introduced in the most delightful way. An alarm rings in the dark, and up she rises out of bed. But as she folds the bed up and moves furniture around it becomes clear, we're in her office. This is where she lives. In short order she puts the room back, lays out her toothpaste and other basic hygiene equipment, and generally gets ready, while reading a book with diagrams of the moon.
It's clear from how smoothly it all goes that she's done this a million times before, and also that she's completely at ease with it all. She's all business, and that's how she likes it.
First scenes are such valuable real estate. If you do them well, you tell us everything we need to know about a character. What they like, who they are, what they're good at; but also ideally what they want and where they struggle--i.e what their journey is going to be. And that's the case here. In 90 seconds we know with absolute certainty that what Margo Madison wants is to be the absolute best at her job, to be the boss.
And we also know with absolute certainty that she's got a big problem, namely that she has no life--not only no significant others but no real relationships. On the most fundamental level she is going it alone. And that will pose issues to her quest.
If you track Margo's story in season one, it's all there in this scene. Her talent gets her noticed, but then she gets passed over initially for the boss job because she's a loner. And when she gets the big job, her big challenge ends up dealing with the overall team in a crisis. She succeeds to the extent that she is able to accept defeat at the hands of her colleagues, really, and draw on her greatest strength, namely her conceptual brilliance.
One other great tip to be gained from Margo's introduction: it's all done without a single word. We learn who she is through her actions.
If you're looking for an exercise for yourself: Pick a script of your own and look at how you introduce one of your main characters. How do you use the real estate? Maybe take a second to write out, "This is who my character is, what they want and what is their struggle," based solely on what you see in that scene. And then, for a second go-round, do the same thing, but based on your character's actions alone, no words. See what you discover!
