Work the Problem

The heart of every screenplay or teleplay is conflict. As they pounded into our heads in screenwriting school: There Must Be Conflict in Every Scene. Sometimes that means manufacturing some, such as with an insolent waiter or a nosy jackass neighbor butting in. Because if you have a scene where everything is rosy, unless it’s ironic, or the conflict exists in subtext, it likely won’t be super engaging.

Yet we writers often make things way too easy on our characters. We use contrivances, coincidences to get from point A to C, leapfrogging over all the obstacles that might realistically pop up and impede that path. To obfuscate our manipulations, we avoid having characters ask obvious, logical and/or important questions, hoping the audience won’t catch on to our trickery. Hey, we have the story planned out a certain way, and that way is etched in granite (or index cards, as the case may be.) Problem is, Deus ex machina — the hand of the writer may be apparent. Not the best way to keep an audience engaged. No, we want to see our characters dealing with unexpected awfulness that screws everything up. It’s precisely those pressure cooker situations that glue us to our seats.

Besides Cranston, the key unifying element of the storytelling in “Sneaky Pete” and its spiritual brother “Breaking Bad”: shit goes south. Seldom can a character accomplish a key task without something going horribly wrong, forcing unforeseen detours and seemingly sidetracking the narrative. Again, these are paths we writers often resist going down. Yet it’s by throwing monkey wrenches into the gears and forcing our characters to think their way out of awful jams that the brilliance emerges.

I’m sure everything’s going to work out great for these two.

To avoid spoiling “Sneaky Pete,” let’s look at some situations from “Breaking Bad.” Unexpected complications made that show. Take the fifth season train heist, for example. Walt’s brilliant plan to rob the methylamine without anyone ever knowing it was stolen goes off without a hitch — until a good Samaritan shows up at just the wrong time to push the stalled car off the tracks, thus freeing the train to continue on its way before the heist is complete. With the ticking clock now ratcheted up 300%, can the team pull it off in time? And then to “top the topper,” as Blake Edwards called it, the little kid shows up on his dirt bike and gets a good look at everyone. The repercussions from what happens next completely change the character dynamic for the remainder of the series and set into action a whole new chain of events.