Introduce Yourself : That time of the month again... by Christopher Neal Fisher

...by which I mean time for another IYW, of course. And once again, I’m here to see some of the new faces, and the new introductions from folks who, like me, have been around here for a while. 

So who am I? Christopher Neal Fisher, A 63 year old retired dude, husband, and aspiring screenwriting. I’m the creator of a TV series concept with the working title of Bayou Noir, as well as am working on some short film scripts based on folktales from the Missouri French country (an area of Missouri about 30-45 minutes south of St. Louis), and doing research for another series idea, set in the town of Kaskaskia (a French colonial town which became both the territorial and also first state capital of Illinois) around the turn of the 19th century. However, my main project — and the one I think is also currently my best work, and has the best chance of any sort of noteworthy success — is Bayou Noir.

“What is Bayou Noir”, you ask? Well, I guess an “elevator pitch” for it might go like this:

“A Southern Gothic Soap Opera; William Faulkner, Dark Shadows, and The Sopranos all meet in the middle of Louisiana’s famed ‘Cajun Country’”.

The current logline for it goes like this:

“The saga of a wealthy and powerful Louisiana French family, as they struggle with familial dysfunction and conflicting agendas, and against enemies human and supernatural — any of which could end them and their ‘bayou empire’”

I have a two page pitch and a pilot script for it, the latter of which has been a semi-finalist in a few contests, and was a finalist in the Stage 32 6th Annual TV Writers’ Contest in 2021. I’m currently working on drafts for scripts beyond the pilot, and am hoping this will the year find its way to a producer, or at least a manager or agent, that sees the same potential in it as an entertainment property that I do.

Last time I was here, I mentioned that I had a 30 min. consultation with an exec coming up sometime soon about Bayou Noir. Well, it took place on January 29th. I won’t go into details about what what said, but I will mention a few things it made me aware of that I need to address (some of which I was already aware of) when having someone review my pilot or pitch.

One thing is that nearly every reviewer — even the ones that have given my script a really positive review — seems to get at least something wrong about it. The most common thing is that it is a serial drama (and was deliberately created to be such), and they seem to be reading it through “stand alone episodic” lenses. In a way, I understand why this may be happening; the majority of shows in the history of the medium have been stand alone episodic, of course. But I think it’s pretty clear to anyone familiar with both narrative formats that while there are certainly things a serial and a stand alone have in common (as does pretty much all storytelling), there are also several that are quite different between them (like the pacing of the plots in the different storylines, the fact that most serialized dramas have a larger “character driven” aspect to them, etc.), ones that I’d think would be fairly obvious, but for some reason aren’t to some readers, which results in some of them thinking I don’t know what I’m doing with regard to my writing. (A bit of background: when I first conceived Bayou Noir, I believed most commercial outlets would consider it “too different” to be of interest to them, so originally did it as an Internet Soap. I switched it to an hour long TV series after one reviewer gave the original pilot a “consider”, and encouraged me to do it as an hour-long. Since I already had two other scripts done, I just put them together with some linking material into a single script.) I need to find a a way to make clear from the start, or at least to ascertain if the reader has noticed it themselves, that a serialized narrative format is not only a part of the overall series format, and a deliberate artistic and stylistic choice on my part, but as essential to the series as the Southern Gothic genre that it’s set in. (BTW, changing it to a stand alone episodic is not an option, as over the years I’ve been working on this, I have become absolutely convinced that Southern Gothic in a TV series format with a ensemble cast has to be done in a serialized drama format, otherwise it doesn’t work, and doesn’t do justice to the genre.)

Another thing that I’ve run across is reviewers and readers who aren’t familiar with the milieu the show is set in. For example, I’ve had more than one criticize me for having female characters that aren’t “strong”. If you’re at all familiar with the setting my show takes place in, then you know that what would constitute a “strong” woman in New York or Chicago is different from what would constitute one in “Bayou Country”. Also, I’ve had some of them mistakenly think that the patriarch of my protagonist family (there isn’t a single overarching protagonist to the series, each storyline has its own protagonist or protagonists, though the family patriarch is — by virtue of the “long shadow” he casts over everything due to his power and influence — the main character of the show) is a mob boss or organized crime boss, when in actuality he’s an old school southern “town boss” (if you’ve ever seen the classic 1958 movie “The Long Hot Summer”, the Will Varner character in that movie is a good example of this). There are definitely overlaps between a mob boss and a town boss as to the less-than-legal activities they engage in or commit, but they are still two different entities, with different goals and purposes to them. Finally, a few seem to think the series is set in New Orleans, when it isn’t (a few short but crucial scenes in the pilot take place there, but the town of Bayou Noir, in my mind, is set maybe an hour to an hour and a half away from there.

One thing that has occurred to me in all this is that I know that a lot of people who read scripts, in whatever capacity they may be, often have a lot on their plates, and thus I’m wondering if sometimes some of the misunderstanding about my script/series concept comes from them not reading it carefully enough?

Anyway, all of those are things I think I do need to address, if I want to improve my chances of my script/my show getting the needed attention. In the meantime, working on my scripts and ideas continue, and of course,,“real” life marches on…


Until next time, everybody, stay well, keep writing, and may the groundhog in your area not have seen his shadow. Ciao!