Previously… I’ve always read scripts but since late 2017, I’ve made sure to read at least one every day. I can argue it’s for work, I can make an exceptional case for how my writing is better for my doing this, but it is also just the single most fantastic fun.
So far in 2024 I’ve read 552 scripts ranging from ones made this year to some that are decades old, and while five earned a note from me along the lines of “the depths of shit”, 300 were Good or Very Good. But then very handily for a man wanting a countdown, just 10 were “Superb, so well done, or so perfect.”
Very unusually, though, the 10 came chiefly from just a couple of sources. One is the BBC Writers website where this year they uploaded countless Doctor Who and Doctor Who-related scripts. I say countless, but that’s only because a lot were already uploaded and I’d read them before. This year 233 of my reads came from this brilliant supply, though.
And then in mid-October, my absolute favourite online source for TV scripts, suddenly added a huge number of them, including ones that actually made me gasp. TV Writing put online many scripts from the unmade 1970s TV series “Star Trek: Phase II,” for instance. It’s a famous show considering it was never made, but to see on the page what it would be like, it was astonishing.
It also wasn’t great, as it turns out, but it was great to see these scripts.
Just as it was to see the pilot script of Mad About You by Danny Jacobson and Paul Reiser. Or Tenspeed and Brownshoe by Stephen J Cannell, a superb pilot script I have waited decades to read. About 35 scripts to Moonlighting, a dozen Columbos — although only 8 from the original and best run.
That TV Writing site has been a gift this year and so far I’ve read 98 scripts from it. Really, 2024 has a been an impossibly rich year for this reading lark and yet somehow here you go, here are just 10 of what I believe are the very best. If you’ve not read them yet, I so much envy you having them to look forward to that I might just read them again myself.
10. Veronica Mars: Drinking the Kool-Aid by Rob Thomas
9. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Trials and Tribble-ations by Ronald D. Moore & Rene Echevarria
8. Ready When You Are, Mr McGill by Jack Rosenthal (Book)
7. Misery by William Goldman (Book)
6. Doctor Who: Heaven Sent by Steven Moffat
5. The Mary Tyler Moore Show: Love is All Around (Pilot) by James I. Brooks and Allan Burns
4. Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day 1 by Russell T Davies [special mention for the following four parts]
3. Barbie by Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach
2. Doctor Who: Dot and Bubble by Russell T Davies
1. Doctor Who: 73 Yards by Russell T Davies
One curious thing, though. Those last two and at least one more from Ncuti Gatwa’s first run as the Doctor — I want to say Boom by Steven Moffat — feel like they are made for Disney. Not in some bad way, but rather a practical one: these scripts feel as if they are written to be read by people including Disney executives. They are doubtlessly drama people, but they’re US drama people and don’t have Doctor Who in their bones.
I can’t pin that down. There’s just an accommodation for new people that I never noticed in previous Who scripts and that believe I sometimes see in these latest ones.
But then if I’m unable to point to a line or a word that made me think this, that’s practically notarised evidence compared to this next thing. Sometimes Doctor Who has felt as if it were written falling down, like it was in a headlong rush to the ground and that each passing deadline was giving it more verve. I wonder if there are no passing deadlines now, that to be part of the Disney-backed production schedule means scripts are finished at a far less last-minute stage than maybe they were before.
Still, even if I’m right about that, the best Doctor Who scripts continue to be read as if they are written by someone standing up and moving, instead of sitting for the tenth straight hour of their day.