“Christian cringey”is a term my wife and I use to describe the lackluster creative content our side has put out for decades. All writers need to understand what makes great stories take flight, and what causes them to crash and burn on take-off. If you’re a creative writer, this post will serve as reminder of what works versus what doesn’t, what could work with a few tweaks, and what doesn’t work and never will.
To do this, we’ll take a look at the show Homestead (currently in production but floundering) because it presents a unique opportunity to see if its writers can right their ship before it’s too late.
Apocalypse Now
I’ve been happy to see Angel Studios’ success in challenging mainstream Hollywood the past several years with quality movies and TV shows.
And I’m always up for movies and books with apocalyptic scenarios because I love seeing how people envision overcoming technical and societal obstacles. So I was looking forward to Angel Studios’ feature film Homestead (2024) and the followup TV series currently on their streaming site.
When you take away things like the power grid or supply chains, interesting things happen, with or without zombies. Some of the better films and TV shows to tackle this genre in recent years were Jericho (2006-2008), Children of Men, and The Road (more on those later).
I went in knowing it had poor reviews—mostly owing to the fact that audiences didn’t realize the feature film was basically a pilot for the TV show. Understandable, but I knew that aspect going it so my beef isn’t about that.
The studio used the film to see if there was an audience, and is now crowdsourcing future TV episodes since it did well in theaters. That’s innovative and I don’t fault them for that. In fact, the reason I feel compelled to write this is precisely because they’re still producing future episodes.
What they’ve produced so far has good bones, but unless they flesh it out in a drastically different manner, they’re about crash and burn. The problem, as is usually the case with movies or books that miss the mark, is in the writing.
Writing matters, and if we want our stories to take flight (and maybe make some money off of them) we need to understand that.
Writing Tip #1: It’s all about the characters
And it always will be. No amount of beautifully lit interiors, breathtaking drone shots, or CGI mayhem can make up for a cast full of characters nobody likes. And there are very few characters to like in Homestead.
The main character, Jeff Eriksson, is an ***hole. His wife,Tara, is better written but she’s a bit one-note, and does little more than shake her head while delivering mild rebukes whenever Jeff does or says something to make the audience lose respect for him. Now, you can get away with Jeff having a redemptive character arc so long as you have a different hero we can root for in the mean time.
Homestead has none.
The one who came closest to filling that story need in the film was the other main character, Ian Ross. However, Ross’ hero status ends up shattered with stereotypical, lazy writing.
Just as we’re starting to see him as a much-needed counterweight to Jeff’s overbearing jerkiness—and as the film starts building some realistic tension—Ian goes off on an out-of-character dad-rant in the most stereotypical manner possible: disapproving his daughters love interest.
As writers, we have to understand how much tension is appropriate. It’s like seasoning with salt: a little enhances flavor, too much kills the dish.
In that small moment of unnecessary, sitcom-level writing, we lose a major degree of the respect we’ve garnered for Ian.
And now the only main characters left to root for are Ian’s wife Jenna and a couple of star-crossed teenagers. But Jenna isn’t given the opportunity to work the problem before bringing in another slate of unlikable characters—a liberal psychologist, a pathological SEAL, a shiesty assistant, and a do-nothing collection of side characters who pointlessly flow in and out of scenes.
To make matters worse, Homestead: The Series, in classic soap opera modus operandi, sidelines Ian into a coma so that Ian’s mustache-twirling villain of a brother, Cain—no subtlety there at all—can make everyone equally miserable.
Now, villains are great, so long as they make sense. You need to write them in a way that explains how they got to that point, and its even better if you kinda sympathize with them a little. Unfortunately there’s no discussion on Cain’s motivations or his underlying personality. He’s just evil because…because they need another character to be evil, apparently.
You can’t do this with your characters and provide winning content.
The audience needs someone to root for. We need villains who have understandable reasons for doing what they do. We need someone to respect, who does the right things, makes sound decisions, and wins more often than not. That can be a shaky character at first (like Ian) but we need to like him before we can get on board with his character arc.
Nobody wants to watch a movie or read a book full of characters they don’t care about. Likewise, nobody wants to sit around for six hours waiting for one to emerge from a primordial soup of stereotypical archetypes.
A good contrast to this is the TV show Jericho. It features a similar scenario—an America suddenly in the dark with little understanding of why, featuring societal collapse nationwide and small town folks trying to survive it—but with one huge difference: Almost every character in Jericho is someone you want to survive. When they bring in villains, these are usually dangerous people but also relatable since they too are trying their best to survive and provide for their clans.
The take away for us writers should be this: Establish your heroes early, develop them quickly, and get them moving in the right direction before the main action heats up.
Setbacks are fine so long as they’re brief and the characters overcome them for a greater purpose later on—this is called setup and payoff. And since Homestead is funding new episodes based on viewer satisfaction, it may be too late to overcome the 5.7 IMDB rating.
My Homestead advice: Bring back Ian and make him a firebrand, and quickly, before these characters die on the withering vine. Also, develop some of the nameless, faceless homesteaders instead of using them as background fodder.
General writer’s advice: Make your heroes likable and your villains’ motives understandable. Every episode or chapter should feature a win, a lesson, or a challenge. Periodic wins keep your audience satisfied, lessons learned and applied grow our respect for the characters, and new challenges further the story.
Writing Tip #2: Dialogue
The seventeen year old girl asks the virtual stranger she met two days ago, “How do you know if you’re in love?”
Stop. Right. There.
Someone on Homestead’s script staff should have done what I just did: Stop the presses, because no seventeen year old girl would ever say that. Ever. Especially to a stranger. (My wife says, “Well, they might, but we still don’t want to watch it.”)
Writers do this all the time, though. In order to further the narrative or express a degree of inner struggle, they place words or phrases in the mouths of characters that nobody would ever say in real life.
I remember sitting on a plane when I was 19, working on a sort of Dazed and Confused * manuscript inspired by the true stories of my buddies and me. I handed the scene I’d just written to my friend, thinking it was literary gold. He handed it back and said, “It’s okay…but dude, I would never say that line.” He pointed to the page, “Don’t make me sound like a dumba**, Vinnie.”
Message received.
*[Don’t ask me for the manuscript. I’m sure I burned it because a) it stank, and b) it probably could have been used as evidence.]
The actress forced to deliver that 17-year old’s line, Olivia Sanabia, plays the character of Claire Ross in Homestead, and she’s had some atrocious dialogue to overcome; this is just one of many examples I could give.
It’s all the worse because she and her pseudo-boyfriend Abe are, by that point, the only likable characters remaining on the show. Unfortunately, Abe’s scripts are just as eye-roll inducing. These actors deserve better and it’s testament to their abilities that they’re still holding up.
Words matter, all of them. Dialogue needs to be genuine. If a normal person wouldn’t say it, neither should your character.
Instead of having your 17-year old sitting on a log for an ad-hoc counseling session about the concept of love, show her dialed-in parents noticing it and all of its awkward, teenage angsty glory.
We already knew she was in love with Abe when they snuck out for some middle-of-the-night gardening, which also provided his character some much needed therapy for his emerging PTSD. You don’t need more than that. Silly dialogue wastes everyone’s time. Show, don’t tell, is the cardinal rule of storytelling for a reason.
I have a four-book series of military fiction. One of my greatest struggles was writing realistic dialogue for SOF guys that wasn’t crude and profanity-laden. The old war movies and books did an excellent job of this, so it’s doable. It just takes creativity.
We need to be careful to not let our creativity delve into the absurd. “Gosh darn,” and “holy moley” aren’t things any soldier, even the most puritanical ones, would say during a mission. They’d get such sentiment beaten out of them on Day One of boot camp.
Swinging the opposite direction is just as bad. Books and movies that drop profanities everywhere is also bad writing because normal people don’t talk like that (even soldiers, even criminals) no matter what Martin Scorsese thinks. And most audiences don’t want to read or hear it.
Another example of dodgy dialogue:
In one of the early scenes we hear Jeff tell one of his guys, “The Russians took out the power grid,” based on radio chatter rumors. Since the movie’s opening scene showed two very non-Russians nuking L.A., all this comment does is tell us Jeff isn’t very discerning, a shoot-first-ask-questions-later type A personality. It sets the tone of not respecting Jeff early on. And unless you plan on having a Red Dawn Russian invasion action scene, it’s dumb to layer this onto your storyline.
It’s much better to leave the whys and hows of the setting ambiguous and develop those later on, or not at all if it doesn’t really matter to the story. The film The Road (2009) never explained how the world ended because it didn’t need to. It was all about surviving in the present.
Homestead advice: Ditch the cliches and start passing around those sheets of dialogue for critique before shooting.
Writers advice: Before writing dialogue, ask yourself if a real person would talk that way. Write the scene as if you’re a scribe in the room listening to the conversation, and then write down what they have to say.
Also, have someone critique your work. You may not like having to ditch entire pages, but good editors will show you what needs to be tossed. Or as my buddy Frank once said, “Don’t make me sound like a dumb**s.”
Writing Tip #3: Are you not entertained?
A story is meant to entertain an audience. It can have elements of tragedy but those should be rare and only used to further the narratives of those who survive, and only when necessary.
Some of the best books and movies are ones where the characters make good choices and win from time to time. If you put your man in a hole, don’t leave him there for the entire run time. Get him out in a timely manner and count the experience as a necessary lesson for later on.
The film Children of Men (2006) features an ordinary man trying to shepherd an important woman across an apocalyptic society. He gets into several dangerous situations, and experiences injuries and loss but keeps moving forward and gets some time to breathe and relax along the way. This gives us hope that it might turn out alright and keeps us rooting for them during the next leg because we know they might just make it.
In episodic shows, end each one on a high note. The old adage of “leave ‘em hanging” with a cliffhanger worked in the network TV era because we had so few options. Nowadays, audiences can easily walk away and find something better. And if you’re crowd-sourcing new episodes, you definitely can’t rely on fan loyalty yet.
I always hated the To Be Continued scrawl, and won’t bother with shows that use it now. This is why shows typically drop the entire season at once, and usually tie up each season neatly, and put a nice bow on top. The Hunger Games franchise killed itself largely because it strayed from the books and instead of ending Catching Fire with a wedding and a celebration, giving our heroes a moment of joy in spite of the coming battle, it instead ended with a raving Peta and impending doom. Then it doubled down on turning its main character into a unlikable whiner.
Don’t do that, because pretty soon you’ve got an audience asking itself, “Why am I still watching/reading this? This is annoying and miserable.”
Homestead and writer advice: Give your audiences a chance to smile from time to time. We’re here to be entertained. Let your heroes do smart things, give them motivation to keep going, and give the audience a sense that things might just work out.
Now all of you: Go forth and create something beautiful. The world needs what you have to offer, just make sure it doesn’t suck first. If you’re not sure, ask your best friends. They love you and want you to succeed, and they respect you too much to lie to you.
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