I’m tempted to start this thought at the end, partly because it fits the topic that’s on my mind, but also because I just generally get irritated by people telling me to begin at the beginning. So let’s do it.

I just re-watched “Marathon Man” and first-time-watched the opening episode to a serial called “Perpetual Grace, Ltd,” by Steven Conrad & Bruce Terris. What matters for what follows is that the show opens with a man being persuaded to con two old people out of their money. We see how he’s talked into it — the old couple stole that money anyway — and we learn how he’s going to work his way into their home to pull off the con.

And then away off we go, into the con, into the story. There’s much more to come, there are many twists, but here’s the thing. The laying out of the con is at the start of the filmed and aired version of the pilot, it is not in the start of the script.

I think it’s rare to prefer the second version of something you like. For instance, The Princess Bride — by William Goldman, who also wrote Marathon Man and I re-read both scripts this week — is a marvel of a novel to me because I read it before seeing the film, and consequently the film is fine. Whereas film-first friends think the movie is a marvel and the book is fine. You can’t help some people.

But what I’m saying is there is maybe I preferred the script just because that’s what I knew first. I hadn’t heard of the show, I came in totally cold, I just read the next script I could find online. And I’ll tell you that it was late at night when I was reading it, I found it all a bit slow but then by perhaps 20 pages in, grief, I was hooked. I was hooked by how well it turned on a moment, how we went from utterly believing the con man’s story to realising something is wrong.

All of that is on the page, is in the script. None of it is in the aired version where, instead, we know it’s a con from the start.

I’m not going to tell you that I’ve been thinking about this for a week, because you’d hear me. But among the many things I keep coming back to is that bit I just said of finding it slow at the start. Maybe there wasn’t enough to keep people watching if it took a considerable time to get to the reveal of the con, or at least to the reveal of a suspicion that there is one. Maybe this story needed to have its core pulled forward, I don’t know.

But then — hopefully not to spoil anything — Marathon Man, the film, also pushed something back, it delayed something, and this time I think both versions work. There’s a character who turns out to be bad. In the script, we learn this very quickly and the tension is over when will the good guy lead figure it out.

In the finished film, the scene revealing this is gone. I think the decision was that there is enough left to make you doubt, but not to be so sure, and therefore the moment when the good guy lead learns it can be bigger. We can feel something more of the betrayal, so it feels like a character moment as much as a spy film plot reversal.

Marathon Man is paced better than Perpetual Grace, Ltd, I think. Later in the Perpetual pilot, someone is killed and we’re supposed to think we know who it is, but it isn’t. On the page, that was a big moment, but on screen, it felt as if we barely registered there’d been a death before we learned the truth of who had died. Plus there is a peculiar thing in the aired pilot where a character’s face is quite elaborately hidden for several minutes, and it’s the reveal that the actor is Ben Kingsley that takes us smashing into the title sequence.

Over and over, I think about that. I think initial shots showing that character only obscured, in shadow, or backlit, do all ultimately give us an idea that he’s stronger than we are otherwise led to believe. But other than that, the punch out into titles seems like it solely works if you know Ben Kingsley.

So maybe this show’s timing just didn’t work all round.

But it’s left me circling the issue. I think the core idea at the heart of this show so far, the business of the con, is extremely well done on the page. I wonder if when it came to later drafts and the aired version, the makers were just so keen on it that they wanted to get to the idea faster. I know that temptation, I know from having a moment or a character that I’m obsessed with and want to get you to meet them as fast as I can. I know, too, that I have a habit of racing on to the next idea and the next.

There’s that thing Douglas Adams said about how to make a great script, you just a single really good idea — followed by a thousand other really good ideas.

I’m too keen on racing ahead and it means that I fail to milk all of the drama out of an idea. I think the Perpetual Grace, Ltd, script may have been slow and so the aired version may have been done this way to fix that.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid I also know this. By the end of the script, I wanted to know more. By the end of the aired episode, I’m not so fussed.