by Neil Landau
The Final Montage
This type of pilot ending gives us a snapshot of the main characters in the series. It’s often accompanied by music and indicates where each character might venture in his/her life in future episodes. It’s primarily visual, but sometimes contains voice-over and/or economical dialogue. It gives the viewer a lay of the land in a poetic, lyrical way. Sometimes the camera cranes up to give us a global view of the characters in their respective worlds. Sometimes the camera is like a bee buzzing from flower to flower—and then settling down on one main flower: the main protagonist on the show. For examples of this type of ending, check out the pilots for Parenthood, Friday Night Lights, and Sons of Anarchy.
At the end of the pilot for Boardwalk Empire, we get a montage that demonstrates Enoch “Nucky” Thompson’s (Steve Buscemi) ascension to power: from corrupt county treasurer to notorious crime kingpin of Atlantic City during the Prohibition Era. The climactic montage sequence shows how Nucky’s brother, Sheriff Eli (Shea Whigham) kidnaps and murders Hans Schroeder (Joseph Sikora) as retribution for Hans beating his wife Margaret (Kelly Macdonald) so severely that she miscarries. When Hans’ body is found in a fishing net, along with today’s catch, Nucky frames Hans for the massacre of gangster Arnold Rothstein’s (Michael Stuhlbarg) men that occurred during an earlier botched bootleg heist. The revelation that Nucky ordered the hit on Hans is made clear when he innocently brings Margaret flowers in the hospital. We know from the first scene of the pilot that Nucky is a morally bankrupt opportunist, but by the pilot’s end, we discover his dark side, his true ruthlessness. Atlantic City is his town, and he’ll destroy anyone who tries to challenge him.
Earlier in the pilot, there are two particularly potent, revelatory moments that foretell Nucky’s transformation. In the first, as Nucky walks past a store-front nursery along the Boardwalk, he looks in the window and sees a nurse cradling a newborn baby. He is mesmerized by the infant’s purity and innocence. Then later in the pilot, Nucky walks past a storefront fortune-teller as she reads a customer’s palm to predict the future. She glances up and meets Nucky’s eyes, as if to say, What will be your future? Near the end of the pilot, Nucky’s driver, Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) presents Nucky with the spoils from the botched bootleg heist, saying, “It’s your cut of the proceeds.” When Nucky tells Jimmy that he never asked for the loot, Jimmy responds with, “You can’t be half a gangster anymore.” As a result, when Nucky accepts the blood money, his fate as a full-blown gangster is sealed.
The Final Discovery
The other type of pilot ending packs a stronger punch by essentially pulling the rug out from under us (which in a TV pilot is a good thing).
Here are more examples of pilot endings that succeed in pulling us into the deep end of the series in surprising ways:
Alias: Sydney (Jennifer Garner) learns that she doesn’t work for a sector of the CIA (she works for the enemy), and so does her father. He’s not the mild-mannered guy she thought he was.
The Shield: In the final montage, as Kid Rock’s “Bawitdaba” thumps on the sound track, Detective Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and Detective Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins) kill a drug dealer rival to their boy, Rondell Robinson (Walter Jones), in self-defense, and then Vic shoots fellow Detective Terry Crowley (Reed Diamond) in the face with the drug dealer’s gun. If we didn’t already realize Vic Mackey was a dirty cop, this is a major game changer.
The Newsroom: The audience learns MacKenzie (Emily Mortimer) was actually present for Will’s (Jeff Daniels) rant against America (not a hallucination); she was holding up the signs that prompted him.
Homeland: Carrie (Claire Danes) finally convinces Saul (Mandy Patinkin) something is amiss with returned POW soldier Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) when she points out that Brody is seemingly sending a signal with his fingers whenever he’s being interviewed by the media.
Scandal: The audience learns Olivia had an affair with the president, and perhaps he isn’t telling the truth about the woman who claimed to have had a relationship with him (the phrase “sweet baby” arouses Olivia’s suspicion).
The West Wing: Near the end, the audience learns that Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer) was instructed by the president to fire Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) for his comments on a talk show, and Leo was working behind the scenes to resolve the conflict and save Josh’s job.
Mad Men plays its final trump card when Don Draper (Jon Hamm), who we’d assumed was a womanizing bachelor, goes home to his wife and kids in the suburbs.
Damages reveals that Patty Hewes (Glenn Close) is the devil (more or less) when we see her tossing a studded dog collar into the Long Island Sound beside her beach house. Earlier, we’d witnessed the horrific murder of the dog as a fear and coercion tactic. And now we know it was Patty who ordered the hit.
Lost builds to the reveal that they’re not on an ordinary tropical island because there are otherworldly creatures. They’re in a version of The Twilight Zone.
By the end of the Modern Family pilot, we realize that Jay Pritchett (Ed O’Neill) is Claire (Julie Bowen) and Mitchell’s (Jessie Tyler Ferguson) dad. And as “The Circle of Life” from The Lion King plays in the end scene, it’s Jay who is the vital link between this disparate but loving family.
At the end of the pilot for The Following, former FBI agent Ryan Hardy (Kevin Bacon) manages to apprehend an escaped convicted serial killer Joe Carroll (James Purefoy) and lock him up—but then we discover that Carroll’s followers are still at large and are actively continuing to carry out his nefarious mission.
Bottom line: give us something to discover by the end.
Interview: Veena Sud
Veena Sud Credits
Best known for:
The Killing (Executive Producer/Writer) 2011–2012
Emmy Nominated (Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series) 2011
WGA Award Nominated (New Series) 2012
Cold Case (Executive Producer/Producer/Writer) 2005–2008
NL: My first question is about the murder mystery that played over the two seasons. Did you reverse engineer the plot? In other words, did you start out knowing what you needed to reveal and then structure and back into it?
VS: That’s a great question because we didn’t. All we knew was that at the end of two seasons, we would reveal the killer of Rosie Larson [Katie Find-lay]. But, as far as creating enough material and journeys for each of the characters, over the course of twenty-six episodes, we started from the beginning and from a very character-based place, which was, who is this person? What is their backstory? What is their secret? How do worlds collide? How do secrets become unearthed? And partnerships, and friendships, and family— and a political campaign. We spent a lot of time walking in each character’s shoes before we decided that this was how it would all lay down—the macro plot of the conspiracy and how Rosie Larson walked into the middle of this plan—the final twist of who her killer was. Ultimately, it’s interesting because on Cold Case, we did the very opposite, or at least I did as a writer, which was fleshing out the beginning: Where do you find the body? How does this murder become unveiled and discovered? And then what are the final true moments of this person’s life before they were killed? And then filling in the middle. I knew the beginning, I knew the end, and it was my job at that point to put flesh on that skeleton. Inevitably the end would shift: place would shift, time would shift, things would shift, but for the most part the murder itself would stay intact with the murderer (who would be revealed by the end of each episode). But The Killing was a different type of animal. It was a longer form story. It took, obviously, more time to reveal the truth of the story, and in order to service that we had to be able to go on a very long voyage with these people who, overtime, we identified with and cared about.
NL: You definitely had a lot of plates to get up in the air, just in terms of getting us invested in each person and what they had to lose or what they had to gain from it—both in the political campaign, within the family,
and with Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos). You’re saying though that you didn’t know that Terry (Jamie Anne Allman) would ultimately be the one who pushed the car in—and put the car in gear—that it was something that evolved? That Jamie (Eric Ladin) was the one who accidentally beat her up?
VS: We knew that in the original Danish series, Forbrydelsen, that the character of Ulrik Strange was the killer. And Søren [Sviestrup], who created the Danish series, wanted everything to circle back to something very personal and close to the family. And I loved that idea and having done a lot of research for the last fifteen years with cops—that is the great tragedy of the vast majority of homicides—it’s love and money. It’s the people you know and the people you love—and those are the people you kill. And that’s what was so resonant to me about the tragedy of homicide. I knew I wanted to elicit that feeling—that I wanted it to be a similar place for us. We got to it pretty quickly. Because it’s character based, there’s a ton of time we spend with these people. We wanted to make sure that we weren’t just connecting the dots plot-wise. There were almost two tasks at the beginning: one was to create the macro plot and we knew we would get to the place that was resonant with this particular killer, but what we had to do was say, “OK, let’s just not talk about plot, let’s talk about these people. And, from the characters, let’s start talking about all the different routes and the different roads and the red herrings. And all the different ways that the story could play out.” We knew that as we went along in the first two weeks of meeting in the writers’ room at the beginning of season 1, it was very clear that the world would get bigger and bigger and bigger. Because I loved the idea too that this seventeen-year-old girl from the wrong side of the tracks, crossed paths with this macro-world of powerful men and power brokers in a major American city and how that happened. Everything either had to build on or create a view for the audience into what Rosie was doing that night, who she was, and/or the bigger machinations that were going on in the city of Seattle.
NL: Was the Danish series one hour for each day of the investigation? Was it twenty-six days also?
VS: The Danish series’ seasons were shorter. They had a total of eleven episodes per season. But every episode of their story was one day—that was the DNA of the show which we brought to the American version.
NL: What’s so fascinating about the show for me is its profound exploration of grief. Because grieving is something that gets glossed over in just about every American story. We either want to shy away from it, or with how fast the news cycles go—what is a tragedy on Monday is not even in the news anymore by Wednesday. Everything just passes, when the reality with grief is that it’s an extremely arduous and up and down process. For me, I commend you and your team on letting us know how that feels on so many levels—and also making the body count—count. Every death resonates and has a ripple effect throughout each story and all of the relationships are impacted. To me, that’s one of the great triumphs of the show. When it comes to delving deeper into your characters in every episode and not just a new piece of information for the plot, but going deeper into character—do you have strategies for that? Because it tends to be the weakness that a lot of students struggle with—just digging deeper, finding the nuance, finding the subtext—and the unexpected. Do you create backstory biographies? Sarah is such a complex character. How did you conceive her complicated backstory?
VS: Research is extremely important to me because I think real life has all these nuggets of incredible scenes and incredible stories and characters— and we can’t beat it. It’s there out in the world, and we just have to pick off these specific moments. When I was writing the pilot and when the writers convened for season 1, we spent time—and I had spent time— with families who had lost their children. There’s a national organization (with a branch in Los Angeles) that was so generous with their time. They were such open books about what they went through. I am a cop writer, so I spend a lot of time with cops. In particular, Sarah was a compendium of four different women I had met over the years. Two of them were homicide cops and one of them was homicide and sex crimes on the east coast and one of them was an undercover detective in narcotics in Los Angeles. She actually introduced me to the person who became the basis for the Holder (Joel Kinnaman) character prior to writing the pilot. Hiding out with these undercover cops—I think that’s so important—you have to actually go; you can’t just look it up online. You have to actually go and meet the people and hang out with them or drink coffee with them. Just sit there and shoot the shit and see all those interesting things that they do and who they are and why they do what they do—which is the fascinating thing to me. I did that a lot with the political campaign, prior to writing the pilot, I went up to Seattle and met with various city council members in Seattle. That was my beginning point, before I committed pen to paper. I needed to go out into the world and see what’s there first before I rushed to any judgment about who these people are. Of course, the driving thing for any storyteller is that there’s an element of yourself or a thing that you feel this character can speak to. What we did with all our characters in the writers’ room in season 1 and prior to writing the pilot was just, “Who are they?” Don’t rush the plot because sometimes I do that, and I totally get why students do that because you want to see the action of the character. But I think you have to know who that person is, and then they’ll start instructing you in what they do—and it’s surprising.
In season 1, Holder smoked pot with the girls, and it was a surprising moment. We had spent weeks and weeks and weeks talking about this guy. The writers met the undercover cop he was based on as well as two other undercovers. We talked about them; we mused on them. We talked about Holder—where did he come from? Where did he grow up? What did his family look like? Who is he? It’s in these moments that scenes come out. It’s surprising—I didn’t even expect that that would happen. I was breaking the story and all of a sudden I was like, “Shit—what if Holder did this?” And, that actually was not even based on any of the research.
When you infuse yourself and marinate yourself in the real world of these characters, they will start telling you things and leading you down these roads that are happily surprising and interesting and cool.
NL: Both Linden and Holder are very flawed and they’re both damaged. In season 2, we will find out how extremely damaged she is when she gets placed in seventy-two-hour hold. It creates a lot of empathy for her and deepens the stakes in terms of why she’s so driven. And for Holder, he’s a rookie trying to prove himself. Do you consciously think about likability and empathy and who we are rooting for? Because she’s kind of a bad mother, negligent from time to time. She’s very unconventional and very flawed— and yet doing something heroic and noble. Does it matter to you when you’re creating a flawed protagonist that she’s inherently likable and positive?
VS: It’s a good question because I think it’s one of the hardest things to do, but it’s essential, at least for me it is, that what the world thinks about your character stays irrelevant to you as you’re writing it. If you can see their humanity—and not by providing a litmus test that the world approves of, but that you approve of—that’s all that matters. In terms of Sarah and the bad mother question, it was essential to make her like many, many mothers that I know who are struggling and are torn and are wracked with guilt. I think a lot of people recognize that aspect of the character and that made her human. She’s not a TV mom who somehow juggles it all with a big smile on her face. We all come from places where we wish we could have done more. We wish we could be better—especially with motherhood—it’s such a sacred cow. That was very important for me in terms of all the characters—making them human. Ultimately, we’re all flawed and we have secrets and we’ve done things we feel horrible about—and we’ll do them again. But, those are the type of characters that I find interesting and I’m not even concerned with whether they are likable or not. If I see their humanity, that’s what matters.
; NL: It’s a great answer because most broadcast network TV shows tend to idealize and sugarcoat stuff, and I like that she’s struggling. There were places where you really challenged me as a parental viewer, like when Linden’s son has the flu and she’s stuck at the precinct. I’ll admit that I judged her for that, but I could also see how heavily it weighed on her responsibility to crack the case. Mitch Larsen (Michelle Forbes) is also a flawed mom who chooses to leave her family to grieve, but in doing so (temporarily) abandons her sons and husband when they needed her the most. There are a lot of interesting parallels between Mitch and Sarah in terms of our empathy and how it shifts like a pendulum. The same holds true for Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell); in season 1, he’s slimy and I didn’t trust or like him at all. I thought, of course, he was the murderer early on and Gwen (Kristen Lehman) and Jamie also. But once Darren gets shot, our empathy shifts, and he swiftly earns our compassion. It was a great way to raise his political fortune, but he also genuinely seems to find redemption.
VS: Yes, that’s what we were hoping. I’m glad you felt that way about him.
NL: Regarding point of view—when you wrote the pilot and when you were conceiving the show, were there different points of view? There are times where we have an omniscient point of view, and times when it feels very subjective—where we’re in Linden’s head and we’re seeing things through her eyes. Did you ever wonder what the point of view in terms of telling the story should be? Did you have any rules in the writing room in terms of what you’re limited in showing or not showing? Or was it more organic?
