Screenwriting : One of the best coverages I’ve ever received! by Christopher Neal Fisher

When I entered the Stage 32 6th Annual TV Writer’s Contest last year, I opted for the script coverage offered as an option, since at $49 I thought it was very reasonably priced, plus I’d heard good things about. Stage 32’s coverage service. A couple of days after the Grand Prize winner was announced, my coverage was in my inbox. It was one of the most on point coverages I’ve ever had! For one thing, the analyst actually made it clear that they understood that my show is intended to be a SERIAL DRAMA (aka “Soap Opera”), and not a series of stand-alone episodes, like a Procedural (it was interesting that the analyst used the term “nighttime soap” to describe it, but only because I hadn’t heard that term used in a long time; it certainly is a fitting description of my show’s format). That was hugely important to me, as the. Serial Drama format is a KEY ELEMENT of the show. Also, they recognized the research that went in writing it, which included listening to real-life examples of local speech patterns, and the fact that I’d taken some tropes one would expect to find in a Southern Gothic Soap Opera and turned them on their head. All in all, they seemed to feel it was nearly perfect as is, and made only a few suggestions with regard to things like length of the script. Did they get anything wrong? Yes, but they were all relatively minor things when taken as a whole. (They seemed to think the show is set in New Orleans when only one scene takes place there — my fictional town of Bayou Noir in my mind is an hour or hour and a half west or northwest of the Big Easy. They also likened the patriarch of my protagonist family to JR Ewing, and while he’s charismatic and can be very congenial, even avuncular, and he’s involved in lots of very shady dealings — some of which could even land him in a Federal Penitentiary on RICO Act charges — he’s definitely NOT the out-and-out snake JR is!) So my hats off once again to Stage 32 for providing quality services at reasonable prices!