The Best Teen Show Cold Opens, Or Using a Novel Writing Trick to Fix my Pilot Script

Me, You, and Marisa Cooper's two facial expressions, and a note on paid subscriptions

I’ve been staring at the cold open for a half hour YA show that I’m trying to break. I have the pilot written. It just isn’t good yet. That’s not my self-doubt voice, it’s the literal voice of my agent whose response was basically a verbal shrug emoji. So I’m re-breaking it. And instead of staring at the bad script for hours, I’m doing a version of what I do when I’m stuck on the first or last page of a novel. But instead of taking twenty books at random off my shelves and reading just the first or last page, I’m trolling through my streaming services watching the cold opens of iconic (or just recent and solid) teen shows.

(Caveat:Reservation Dogs, Please Like Me, My So-Called Life, and Gilmore Girls are my top shows. Their opening scenes are perfect. But unlike close reading a novel you’ve read dozens of times, there are some shows that are simply too good, too specifically a thing you’ve never seen before, to break apart and analyze in a way that would be helpful for your own creative process. I have to just let those shows wash over me.)

Gossip Girl: The second best GG co-watch show. Six minutes and six seconds of major character set-ups and immediate establishment of stakes. That’s what a tease requires. At first watch, I thought it was a mess. Second watch, it’s tight.

(I look at my script: I have set up who the main character is, the predicament she’s found herself in, her episodic challenge, her season-long want/conflict, her enemies, her new love interest … but still it is missing something. It is a very good opening for a novel. It is not visually good. And it does not have enough stakes.)

Gossip Girl Tropes: new kid comes to town, two girls fight over one boy, rich sociopath parents who hide mentally ill child, first day of school frenemies situation, and of course, gossip.

Likes: Ms. Bell’s seductive narration - even must-suspend-heaps-of-disbelief to go with it voiceover, exposition via 1 second framed photo still shot, Justin Timberlake drop (what comes around goes back around, subtle subtext!) immediately tells us we’re in the midst of psycho 2007 girls gone wild era misogyny.

Dislikes: POC nameless friends with one-two lines of exposition

Ginny & Georgia

Fav line: “It looks like Paul Revere boned a pumpkin spiced latte”

Minute 3:15 - the main character (who narrates) has stated the theme of the show, or at least summarized the main conflict between Ginny and her mother Georgie (“I’m nothing like my mom”)

Likes: I love that this show is basically set up to be about conflict between the virgin/whore characters but it’s surprise! a mother-daughter duo. On paper in a summary this show would be SO bad, corny, cliche. But in part, thanks to excellent casting and witty dialogue, it really sings.

Ginny & Georgia tropes: Abuse-surviving hustler mom turned psychopath with heart of gold? It writes itself. But Georgia, somehow, is impossible to stop watching. See also: the new kid in school, the biracial kid at rich suburban mostly white school, the hot guy next door, the lesbian best friend, etc. There is nothing new except its tone is campy? And I like this.

(I look at my script: Parents are too generically type-A Mom and Caring Beta Dad! They could be anyone! Must Georgia it up!)

Trinkets

One of my fav teen shows about a queer teen who has to go live with her estranged Dad after her mother dies. She gets caught shoplifting and is sent to a support group for thieves, where she meets two girls from her high school (the popular girl and the rebel, essentially) and they become a little outlaw trio. I love how Portland the show is. And that its queer without being edutainment. (As Ramy jokes in the Golden Globes ep of The Studio, “it’s not just diversity-good”.)

(Look at my script: main character needs more compelling idiosyncrasies!)

Likes: all three main leads are played by strong, phenomenally interesting actors. Nary a waif who is there for the face symmetry alone.

Dislikes: nothing. This show is perfect. Which is why it got cancelled. Unlike:

One Tree Hill

Likes: best name of a TV show

Dislikes: everything else.

If you’d asked me if I’d like to watch a teen show where all of the adults are literal psychopaths I’d probably have said sure, what an interesting conceit! But then the constant incel-level subtext paired with the worst on-the-nose dialogue and soap opera-esque plot points made it difficult. SNL did a parody of this show that was basically this show. Still I watched 5 of 9 seasons during Covid lockdown because I needed to feel smarter than something.

Still the cold open sets up every stupid plot point and hack relationship dynamic perfectly. It’s like a very realistic sculpture of shit.

(Looking at my script: Should she have a secret half-sibling! Sometimes watching this shit isn’t good for writing.)

Perhaps I’ll make this one a series. Thoughts?

Also, I reduced the price of paid subscriptions to five dollars. Because I didn’t understand what I was doing when I set this up, and still don’t to some degree, I hadn’t quite realized you can set your own price. 8 dollars a month seems insane to me. I’m so thankful if you agreed to pay this and will keep trying to make it worth your while, but for three bucks less per month, 30 bucks less per year. I apologize for not knowing what I was doing. This likely won’t change.