Short Version: I read at least one script every day and have done since late 2017. Once a year I go back through and pick out my favourites to enthuse at you about.
But.
They are always scripts I’ve read in this year, yet that almost never means they were actually made or written in the preceding 12 months. I read them as I find them, or as they’re sent to me, and I read them usually because I just fancy it. Sometimes I’m involved in awards reading, though not this year.
All of which means a) my short version is turning out pretty long and 2) there is absolutely not one single statistical or other calculable benefit you can conceivably get from reading my list.
What you may get — what I hope you’ll get — is a list of ten scripts that are just glorious reads. I’d say I envy you if you haven’t read these yet, but that brings me to the Slightly Longer Version.
Slightly Longer Version: for some reason this year, I have been re-reading an enormous number of old favourites. I do this all the time, I have no qualms about re-reading something great, but this did somehow overwhelm 2025. And I know why. I know whose fault it is.
Well, mine, clearly, but also very specifically Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I tell you, do not ever recommend one script from this show and then foolishly re-read it. Because twice — once now in 2025 but also back in 2023 — I have proven incapable of reading only one of the scripts. I keep reading the entire seven years of the show. As I write this, that’s yet again what I’m reading and today’s script, my 473rd of the year, is my 88th DS9 of 2025.
It is such a good series on the page, maybe even more so than it is on the screen. But since DS9 now represents some 18.6% of all the scripts I’ve read this year, I’m allowing myself only one in my top ten.
Although I would fully understand by here you’d forgotten that this was about a top ten. Let me get on with it.
10. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In the Pale Moonlight
One thing to note about this and several other scripts that you can read on the TV Writing website. There’s something up with the site that means you may get a “you have been blocked” message if you try to follow a link directly a particular script. If that happens, go to the front page of tvwriting.co.uk and do a search.
“In the Pale Moonlight” (story by Peter Allan Fields, teleplay by Michael Taylor), takes that idea you have of Star Trek really being about American boy scouts in space and smashes it up. Good people do bad things. This is actually a recurring thing in Deep Space Nine, the idea that the paradise all the other Star Trek shows seem to live in comes at a price.
I now do a weekly script club on YouTube – it’s a book club, but it’s about scripts — and I recommended this on an edition of that a few weeks ago. Hence my subsequent reading of 80 more, and the certainty that I will now read up to the end of the 176th and final script.
9. Edge of Darkness: Compassionate Leave
The link in the title takes you to a copy of the published scripts on the Internet Archive, which is where I read the whole series because I cannot find my copy. But do search out the paperback on Amazon UK or Amazon US.
Back in the 1980s, I took a day off revising for my exams in order to watch all six episodes of this in a cinema — with writer Troy Kennedy Martin there to talk about it.
If you’re a writer, this is a fascinating tale because exactly the same story was told in this BBC television series and then a 2010 film. Both were directed by the same man, too. But where the film is a simple, even simplistic thriller, the series throbs with an undertow about grief, world politics, nuclear terror — and the Knights Templar.
Let me tell you, if you didn’t already know, that the film version starred Mel Gibson. Now, take a guess whether it’s the TV or the movie that was originally intended to see its star character end up by becoming a tree.
8. Sense and Sensibility (Emma Thompson)
I’ve admired Emma Thompson since she starred in “Fortunes of War” and, practically simultaneously, “Tutti Frutti” and it was impossible to accept that this was the same woman. Then she went and wrote this, which is a perfect dramatisation of Jane Austen’s novel.
This is another case where you could click the link in the title to read the script online, but there’s a published version that — if you can find the one with Emma Thompson’s diaries in it — is better. Amazon UK. Amazon US
7. The Simpsons: So It’s Come to This: A Simpsons Clip Show
There are now something like 40 scripts from The Simpsons available online, and the majority appeared this year. I’ve read them all, and practically every one of them is superb, but I particularly enjoyed this by Jon Vitti.
Just to pick one joke, Lisa Simpson begins telling a story and we cut to the events she’s describing. Then we come out of that story, but it’s Homer telling it. Simply mucking about with your expectations of television storytelling, it’s a treat.
6. Before (aka Winston): Pilot
I’ve really got to watch this Apple TV series because I keep hearing criticisms of it, yet this pilot script by Sarah Thorp is an excellent read. Billy Crystal stars in a serious role as a child psychiatrist who is recently widowed and now faces a mysterious new patient.
Really any episode of this series by James Wood is good. It’s a comedy about a vicar, but instead of the 1970s-style of whoops-where’s-my-trousers kind of sitcom, in its small way, this is actually dramatic. Very funny, and considering that I am entirely without faith, I found it surprisingly moving.
This by Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke (based on characters by Linklater and Kim Krizan) may always have been among my top one films. It’s one of those where you start watching or you start reading, you cannot stop.
It’s also the second in a trilogy, following on from Before Sunrise, and I defy you to find a better “previously on…” recap of a preceding film.
Follow. The three movies are about a couple, Celine (Delpy) and Jesse (Hawke), and the second and third are each set — and made — nine years apart. As Before Sunset opens, Jesse has written a book about the events we saw in Before Sunrise and it’s perfect. He’s being interviewed on a book tour, so he’s naturally recounting certain key points, and we are not remotely surprised that as he talks, we see flashbacks to the first film.
Only, as well as being short and deftly written, the sequence lulls you into a rhythm so that you just know when we’ll see the next clip from Before Sunrise. Until there’s a moment when instead of a clip like we expect, there isn’t one. There is a cutaway from Jesse, but it isn’t another clip, isn’t another flashback, it’s a cut to another part of the room he’s in now — and Celine is there.
I tell you, on the page and on the screen, it’s a little gasp. Fantastic.
3. Back to Life: series 1, episode 1
Written by series star Daisy Haggard and the superb Laura Solon, this is another one where I’d recommend all of the scripts. There were two series with a total of 12 episodes and my only criticism is that the finale script of series 1 offers alternative endings — none of which are then how season 2 starts.
It’s about Miri Matteson, who has served 18 years in prison for a crime the show takes its sweet time telling us about. Miri was a teenager when she was jailed and now she’s returned to her home village. She’s there because she has nowhere else to go, but that entire village hates her for what she’s done.
And she did do it. There’s no cop out, no happy misunderstanding. There is much more to it than we or the village first know, but she did it.
All of which sounds very serious, and this is very serious, but it’s actually a comedy and if it had continued past its two series, I’d still be reading it.
2. Clare in the Community: Name Calling
There are twelve series of this BBC Radio 4 comedy and it is both brilliant that two of its scripts are online — but criminal that none of the rest are. I’ve listened to this show a lot over the years, but a few weeks ago I bought the lot through Apple Books. (It’s a radio comedy, not an audiobook, but Apple sells it the same way as if it were just one person reading. I can’t complain, plenty of places list my Doctor Who radio dramas as audiobooks for some reason.)
Every episode is by Harry Venning and David Ramsden, and I suppose its 72 episodes all follow a pretty tight format. Claire Barker (Sally Phillips) is a social worker who is profoundly, shockingly, staggeringly self-centred and self-righteous. It’s amazing how many different ways the show can convey her total self-interest, and as it happens, this particular script includes one of my favourites.
By this stage in the show, Claire and her downtrodden wimp of a husband, Brian (Alex Lowe), have a child. And along with baby Thomas Paine Barker, they have a nanny called Nali (Nina Conti). Cue my favourite line in the series:
NALI: Come along Thomas Paine Barker, bedtime. Say goodnight to Mummy. Mummy is the lady on the left.
Considering that this romantic comedy script by series creator Erin Foster is my favourite of the year, I am still compelled to tell you that I think the final aired version is better than this draft. Just in small ways, tighter lines, a couple of smarter jokes, but better.
Still, the core is the same: Joanne (Kristen Bell) is an outspoken extrovert podcaster and Noah (Adam Brody) is a rabbi. Since this is a romcom, you know that they get together, and they do — plus you immediately, just immediately want them to.
That is damn hard to write.
I suppose any one element of the show is familiar, maybe even so much so as be borderline cliché: their families and friends are against this match, for instance. They have good reasons as well as bad, though, and the mix makes the whole thing have an air of realism even as it’s all heightened romance.
Absolutely brilliantly, you can easily make yourself believe this isn’t going to work out — and toward the very end of the first season, you can genuinely believe it hasn’t. No suspension of disbelief, you believe it and you care.
Maybe even more impressively, though, those family and friends, everyone in the entire story feels real. No one is there to set up punchlines, though they all do, and none of them are there to create obstacles for the drama, though they all do.
It takes more than this first script, but not much more, and so very soon into the run you are also rooting for another couple in the run, and feeling for just about everyone.
I wish more of the ten episode first season scripts were available, but there are two. Once you’ve read this, go straight to the other one — which is episode ten, Bat Mitzvah Crashers, by Craig DiGregorio.
And if this isn’t enough to give you a delicious time reading, or if there’s still anything left in that mug of tea you’re holding, do take a look at the previous years of this utterly pointless annual list I relish bringing to you.
And the blog post that started all of this, 2018’s My 10 Lessons from Reading 620 Scripts.