TV Pilot Tuesday – Battle Creek (from the creator of Breaking Bad)

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Genre: TV Pilot – Cop Procedural with comedic elements

Premise: The most underfunded police department in the state is shaken up when a seemingly perfect FBI agent with unlimited resources moves in across the way.

About: Breaking Bad’s Vince Gilligan’s new show he’s doing for CBS. He originally wrote the script 10 years ago (which is the draft I’m reviewing) but couldn’t get CBS to commit. I’m thinking the success of Breaking Bad might have something to do with their newfound interest.

Writer: Vince Gilligan

Details: 57 pages (12/26/02 draft)

Writer and Creator Vince Gilligan

Like a lot of people, I avoided Breaking Bad at first. Cancer is such a depressing subject matter, it’s hard to get excited about any show or movie that features it. It wasn’t until I heard a couple of DJs talking about the show on the radio and mentioning (spoiler) that Walter’s cancer goes away that my curiosity piqued. I then started, like many, my binge watching obsession with the show.

But Breaking Bad is over and thus begins a new chapter in creator Vince Gilligan’s career. Here’s the scary part about that. It doesn’t matter how high up you are on TV’s power pyramid. If your show ends and you don’t come up with another good one, you become forgotten.

Remember Chris Carter? That man was the king of the world when X-Files was on. Now he’s desperately trying to scrape a sad third X-Files movie together. Yes, the fall in this town can be fast and it can be dramatic. So there’s a lot of pressure on that first show back. At the very least, the show has to stay on the air. And in TV, you just don’t know if that’ll happen or not.

In many ways, it’s even more uncertain than movies because not only are there tons of variables involved, but things happen a lot faster and a lot cheaper. The shooting schedule is tight. You don’t get to do 72 takes like in film. So yeah, audiences will give you a few episodes because you’re Vince Gilligan. But after that, if your show isn’t good, they stop tuning in. I like Michael J. Fox. I was pumped when he came back to TV. But there’s a reason no one watches his show. It’s terrible!

Battle Creek begins in, appropriately, Battle Creek, a mid-sized town outside of Detroit. Russ Agnew, a cop in the town, is pissed. Why? Because it’s impossible to do his job. What, with his department scraping by on a budget meant for the local Sizzler. To give you an idea of how bad it is, when he and his partner, Detective Fontanelle White, set up a fake drug deal to catch a criminal, Russ has to steal his sister’s baby monitor for their snitch’s wire. Yeah, it’s that bad.

Enter Special Agent Milton Bradley, an FBI agent who’s about to make things worse. Milton sets up an FBI satellite office across the hall from the precinct. And he’s got FBI money to back up his high-tech pursuit of local criminals. Plush leather couches. State of the art computers. To make matters worse, Milton looks like a cross between Brad Pitt and George Clooney… only taller.

Russ, the alpha male of the office, is quickly dismissed in favor of this new shiny toy. And Milt quickly makes his mark in the workplace, lucking into a homicide, a homicide that should’ve been Russ’s had he just picked up the phone. Oh, but that’s not the worst of it. The murder victim? His body’s been there for decades. (spoiler) Oh, and it’s JIMMY HOFFA! All of a sudden, a media storm sweeps in and Milt is a superstar. Russ can only watch from the shadows, wondering what could’ve been.

But Russ starts doing some investigating and finds out there’s more to this homicide than meets the eye. And that maybe it isn’t Hoffa. However, he soon learns that the investigation isn’t the job. The job is battling Milton, a man who, we learn, weasels his way into offices, manipulates the people and the evidence around him, and ALWAYS comes out on top. For Russ, the war has only begun.

10 pages into Battle Creek and I was thinking, “Nooooooooooo!” Early Vince Gilligan was not nearly as good as Breaking Bad Vince Gilligan. And we would have to endure a subpar TV show because he’d clung to this old dingy relic. The opening sequence is an uninspired engagement meant to establish how poor the Battle Creek police department is (zoinks! Russ has to steal a citizen’s camcorder during his daughter’s recital in order to tape the drug bust). I was thinking to myself, “This is going to get old fast.”

But then Milton entered the picture and all was good with the world. You had conflict. You had fun. This is where the pros separate themselves from the amateurs. They take an idea and look PAST the obvious execution of it. Anyone else with this idea may have stopped at “Wacky adventures with low-tech outdated equipment.” That’d be good for five episodes. But going a step further and adding irony – a nemesis for Russ who has access to the most advanced equipment and resources in the U.S. – that’s what really transformed this into a memorable pilot script.

And Gilligan kept proving he had the goods. This isn’t the stale rambling True Detective, which was clearly written by someone who was so ignorant to screenwriting that he thought Final Draft had something to do with Vietnam. For example, in the beginning, Russ, via VO, writes a letter to 60 Minutes asking them to come and do a piece on his busted police department in the hopes of getting more funding. Because we’re so focused on the letter, we don’t realize that Gilligan is cleverly using the segement for exposition purposes – to introduce us to the department and its key problems. In essence, he sets up the entire show with that scene. And we never notice.

What I also liked here was that Gilligan never wasted a character. If someone showed up early – even if they were seemingly unimportant – those characters would find their way back in the script somehow. For example, early on, a lonely old women always called and annoyed Russ about “a man in red shorts and a big mustache from next door who would keep bothering her,” an obvious reference, Russ came to realize, to her favorite TV show, Magnum P.I. Except later on, we learn that she WASN’T, in fact, referring to Tom Selleck, but in fact a key figure in the case. That payoff, then, ends up becoming a key late-script plot point.

Also, these sort-of “Underdog vs. Super Hero” situations, particularly in comedy, almost always work (check out Toy Story to see it done to perfection). We set up Russ as the hard-working underdog who’s trying to get by on the worst police budget in America, and this perfect asshole comes along and does everything Russ ALREADY does, yet gets commended for it because he’s taller, better looking, and has the deep-funded pockets of the FBI behind him.

And this is another example of the unexpected villain. As I’ve said before, asshole in-your-face one-dimensional villains are usually boring. Here, Milton is polite, he’s thoughtful, he’s seemingly always trying to help everyone. But it’s a façade. He manipulates and uses people in order to come out looking like the hero. And for that, we hate him way more than if he was a straight-forward dick.

One thing Battle Creek taught me about TV is that – at least for the kinds of TV I like – the best part of the show shouldn’t be about that episode’s mystery. It needs to be about the people solving the mystery. Because when you think about it, on these cop shows, every single type of murder case has already been done. So the audience is usually ahead of the writer on that front. But the reason they’ll keep tuning in is because of that battle between Russ and Milt. We want to see Russ win. That dynamic between the two is what viewers are going to latch onto.

The only reason this pilot didn’t get an impressive (and it had one until 5 pages to go), is that the ending wasn’t as clever as it could’ve been. Things kind of come together coincidentally and it felt a little too easy. Then again, Gilligan has had 10 years to perfect this pilot, so maybe he fixed this problem. Let’s hope so, because if he does, this show (or at least the pilot for this show) could be perfection.

[ ] what the hell did I just read?

[ ] wasn’t for me

[xx] worth the read

[ ] impressive

[ ] genius

What I learned: Today I learned about the “ADDITIONAL ELEMENT.” Every plot has become cliché, especially on the cop/detective procedural. For that reason, your characters simply “solving the case” isn’t going to be satisfactory enough for the viewer. You need an ADDED ELEMENT to the show/movie/plot that’s going to give the audience something ELSE to look forward to. Here, it’s Russ beating Milton. That’s what’s keeping us watching despite the familiarity. Sure, trying to figure out who killed who is fun. But it’s going to be extra fun if we have something else to keep us entertained, like wondering which man is going to win this episode.