So there’s a drama series I enjoyed recently, but when I got to read the script of the first episode, it was profoundly irritating. The only time I’ve had that before was with the script to Jodie Whittaker’s first Doctor Who, and there I’m convinced the problem was that the version available was one edited after broadcast. It was more concerned with timings than text, so sometimes punctuation was a fond childhood memory and lines that worked when spoken by the cast, read instead like puzzles.

In this case, the script to this other recent show was instead an early draft. It had a different title and many of the scenes were different. It’s tempting to say that they were rougher in the script and more polished on screen, because they probably were, but also scripted scenes that weren’t filmed always seem weaker if you saw the show first.

By the way, this isn’t one of those articles where the headline says something dramatic about a show and then makes you wait five paragraphs before naming it. I’m not naming it. As irritating a read as it was, it still got made and therefore is better than I would’ve written it.

But, grief, it was irritating. So irritating that after it, I re-read the pilot script to Poker Face because that’s very good and I wanted something to enjoy, but also because there is one specific thing it does that this other show did. I wanted to see how it was done in Poker Face because I didn’t remember, it was somehow right.

I re-read the sequence. And it was right.

Both shows play about with time in that they, broadly, show us something and then go back to a point before it. In this Other Show, it was for effect. In Poker Face, it’s like Columbo+. On the first go through, we see the murder and the events leading up to it. Then we’re back toward the start but following the story of our lead character as she becomes involved with perhaps the victim, perhaps the murderer. It’s a way of adding another layer of context and often tragedy.

Plus it means although we don’t see her any sooner than we see Lt Columbo (Peter Falk) n his series, Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) is not an impartial outsider coming in after the fact. She’s embroiled in it.

The key thing is this bit of going back in time and it’s about how you tell the audience that this has happened. Given that the first audience is the people who read the script, it becomes how do you say on the page that this has happened.

In the Other Series, the script sets a scene and actually asks us “When?” Before saying “Well, we’ll be wondering exactly that as we…” And it cuts to another scene.

Later: “And just like that — WE ARE CAUGHT UP TO THE TOP OF OUR STORY.”

Here’s how it’s written in the script to Poker Face by Ryan Johnson.

We’ll have plenty of time and cues over the next few scenes to
recognize her and realize we’ve flashed back in time, no need to get it immediately.

That’s it. Just telling us straight, no fuss, no capital letters.

Like I said, both shows got made. And surely this is all personal taste since the two writers of the Other Show just really, really like peppering the script with what I’d call unnecessary detail and I imagine they’d call setting a tone. (“Oh, that’s interesting,” goes one stage direction. Not particularly.)

A script is not meant to be read by the audience, it is a blueprint for the final show. But Poker Face is a better read on the page, I feel, because it gets on with things. The tone is in the story and the dialogue, the life is in the characters rather than the stage directions.

It’s only as I wrote that last paragraph that I realise this, for me, ties me back to when Alan Plater told me that my stage directions made him laugh, but now I need to get that into the dialogue instead.

I think we can say, then, that whether or not I’m able to implement it, I did learn the lesson.