Writing is heavy lifting.
While stars walk the red carpets and directors accept the awards, screenwriters sit in the dark doing the grueling work of story engineering. They break book spines, restructure messy timelines, and transform internal prose into real visual drama.
Look at how Jacob Tierney and co-writer Mike Goldbach are retooling Heated Rivalry for TV, or how Natalie Erika James and Christian White are building horror machinery for Apple TV+. Patrick Ness is taking on a massive fantasy adaptation for Disney, while James Cullen Bressack is preserving his late father Gordon Bressack’s comedic voice through an absurd puppet farce. Screenwriters build the blueprint. Without them, Hollywood is just an empty set with expensive lights.
So let’s talk about the writers putting in the real work this week.
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Showrunner Jacob Tierney knows how to build an engine. As the creator, writer, director, and executive producer driving Accent Aigu Entertainment’s hit hockey romance Heated Rivalry, Tierney is currently cracking the code on season two for Crave and HBO Max. By bringing in co-writer Mike Goldbach to help manage the expanding narrative, Tierney is making an aggressive adaptation choice. He’s taking author Rachel Reid’s fifth and sixth novels and smashing them together into a single concurrent television timeline. Watch closely. This is exactly how you untangle a sprawling book series.
Stop Being Precious About Timelines
Most screenwriters option a book series and assume Season 1 equals Book 1. Stop doing this. Bloated, meandering pilots usually follow. Viewers want the meat of the story fast. Tierney figured this out immediately by using Reid’s second book as the primary engine for the first season. He stripped parts of the first novel strictly for secondary flavor. Now he is adapting book six and book five simultaneously for the upcoming spring 2027 release. Break the spine of the books. Reassemble the plot around the emotional core of the characters. Throw the publishing order in the trash. [And let’s be honest. Half those early books in a long series are just the author figuring out the world. Skip the throat-clearing.]
The Secondary Protagonist Problem
You will face a very real structural problem when your show gets renewed. You need to expand the world. In Heated Rivalry, CAA-repped Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie anchor the narrative. Their characters spent a decade hiding their relationship, creating intensely personal stakes. But a multi-season run requires a wider scope. Enter Charlie Gillespie and WME-repped Justice Smith. These two actors are carrying the plot of an entirely separate book folded into the same season. Give your new characters their own structural engine. Make them carry their own weight.
Don’t Let the IP Bully You
IP is raw material. Fans will lose their minds on social media over changed hair colors. Let them complain. Your job is to make good television. Unlike novelists, you lack the luxury of sitting in a character’s internal monologue for fifty pages. Television demands rising action, episode cliffhangers, and act breaks. Merging two separate storylines into one season forces the narrative pace to accelerate and naturally cuts the fat. A faster story keeps the network happy.
Pitching the Hybrid Season
Next time you walk into a pitch with a seven-book fantasy series, pitch the hybrid model. Tell the executives exactly how you plan to cannibalize the later books to fix pacing issues in the earlier ones. Showing them how combining storylines saves the budget proves you understand the physical mechanics of television production. Executives want a showrunner who knows how to build a scalable television engine. Adaptations are translations. Start speaking the language of television.
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Alfonso Cuarón (WME) is bringing his Apple TV+ overall deal to bear with Ascension, a new thriller starring Caitríona Balfe (Outlander, WME). Co-showrunners Natalie Erika James and Christian White (the team behind Apartment 7A, repped by WME and TFC Management) adapt Adam Nevill’s novel Last Days, putting Balfe in the shoes of a divorced documentary filmmaker investigating a 20th-century cult.
The Trojan Horse Profession
You need your protagonist to poke their nose where it doesn’t belong. A documentary filmmaker is a highly functional vehicle for this. It gives them a badge, a camera, and a reason to ask deeply uncomfortable questions.
Civilian protagonists in thrillers usually require twenty pages of justification for why they haven’t just called the cops. A filmmaker’s literal job is to stay in the room and get the footage. [Notice how quickly that solves your second-act engine problems.] They have an external mandate forcing them toward danger.
Filling the Emotional Void
Your character needs a reason to fall for the trap. Balfe’s character in this series is a recently divorced mother. She is lonely.
The cult offers her refuge before it ever shows its teeth. You hook an audience by giving the character exactly what they lack emotionally. Make the audience understand why the protagonist actively ignores the red flags. A character running from men in robes belongs in a slasher film. A lonely mother finding the exact community she desperately seeks anchors a psychological thriller. Write the seduction. Make the danger appealing first.
The IP Thriller Premium
Streamers are hunting for elevated genre pieces with built-in audiences. Internal tracking across the 2024-2025 acquisition cycles shows serialized thrillers adapted from established literature are bypassing development hell entirely. Apple specifically wants high-end packaging. Cuarón attached as an executive producer and writer automatically bumps this from a standard pitch to a straight-to-series order.
You probably don’t have Cuarón. But you can still build a package that commands attention.
Find a novel, a podcast, or an article that already proves the concept works.
Writing the Gradual Trap
The logline explicitly states she discovers something insidious beneath the teachings. The transition from safety to terror must be earned.
Pacing is everything. You lay the groundwork of comfort. You introduce a single, easily dismissed anomaly. Then another. By the time your protagonist realizes the door is locked, they should be the ones who handed over the key.
Give your characters agency in their own doom. Make them complicit. Their eventual fight for survival will be infinitely more satisfying to watch.
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Patrick Ness is stepping up to the Disney Live Action plate to adapt Miye Lee’s Korean bestseller, The Dallergut Dream Department Store. You know Ness from writing both the book and screenplay for A Monster Calls, showrunning the Doctor Who spinoff Class, and scripting a Master and Commander prequel. Now he is tasked with turning a fantasy novel about a retail shop that sells literal dreams and the nightmares threatening its sleeping clientele into the first film of a planned trilogy. The property has already moved two million copies across twenty territories. It represents exactly the kind of established IP studios are hungry to acquire right now.
The Built-In Audience Tax
Original scripts are a tough sell. A 2026 industry report shows that book adaptations generated 57% higher box office revenue than non-adaptations over a four-year tracking period.
Studios desperately want a safety net, and an existing fanbase provides that exact comfort. We can sit around complaining about the death of original cinema all day, or we can look at the board and play the pieces in front of us. To get paid to write movies right now, you need to know how to strip a novel down to its studs.
Grounding the High Concept
Look at the core engine of Lee’s book. A department store where people buy dreams is incredibly clever, but undeniable stakes are what actually get a movie greenlit. The story follows a new hire named Penny who has to stop a mystery before dangerous nightmares escape the store. That grounds a wild fantasy concept in a deeply relatable working-class narrative. Penny just wants to keep her new job, and if you take a bizarre premise and attach it to a human anxiety we all intuitively understand.
Stop Writing Lore
Disney wants a trilogy out of this material, and the absolute fastest way to ruin a franchise starter is by stuffing the first act with mythology.
Writers get obsessed with world-building. They will bend over backward to explain the rules of their magic system. Stop doing this because the audience does not care yet. Your first movie has to function completely on its own. You build the mythology by having the characters solve an immediate, pressing problem. Introduce the world through action. The lore can wait for the sequel.
Mining International Markets
We are watching a steady wave of international properties hit the studio system. Korean entertainment has thoroughly saturated the global market. If you want to find a property to adapt, you need to look past the domestic bestseller lists. Every junior executive in town already has coverage on those books. Start reading translated fiction. Look at graphic novels from Argentina or sci-fi from China. Find a hit in another territory and figure out how it translates to a domestic audience. The film rights are often cheaper because the concepts are usually fresher.
The Ruthlessness of Adaptation
Since books rely on interior monologues and movies demand physical action, you have to translate those internal feelings into something an actor can actually do on screen. Ness adapted his own work with A Monster Calls, and that requires a very specific type of ego management. Adapting another author requires cold, calculated ruthlessness. You identify the emotional spine of the story and protect it at all costs. Everything else is just raw material. Keep the core feeling. Change the plot mechanics to make it cinematic.
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James Cullen Bressack is an indie director who usually makes action films with guys like Jean-Claude Van Damme or shoots horror movies entirely on VHS. Now he is adapting Fuggedaboudit!, a 2009 stage play written by his late father, Gordon Bressack, who was a television comedy heavyweight who took home three Emmys for defining 90s animation staples like Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain. James is producing a feature film version of the play with a highly unusual twist. The entire cast will be played by puppets.
The Gimmick Must Serve the Story
Let’s talk about the puppet thing. Amateurs resort to weird formatting choices or bizarre visual gimmicks to hide a weak script. A cheap trick won’t save bad dialogue.
But Bressack is making a highly calculated move here. The script is an absurdist comedy about an amnesiac New York model dealing with exes and mobsters trying to rewrite his past. Puppets force the audience to immediately accept a heightened reality, solving a tonal problem.
You can apply this same logic to your own dead scripts. We all have that one script sitting in a drawer that works on paper but feels slightly off in execution. Change the wrapping paper. Turn your stale political thriller into a contained sci-fi. Make your grounded family drama an animated feature.
Stop Chasing the Default
We are conditioned to write for standard live-action production which can severely limit your options.
Gordon Bressack spent his life writing legendary animation, but he always wanted to see this particular story done in live-action. His son realized a straight adaptation would miss the inherent cartoonish energy of his father’s comedic voice. He compromised by finding a middle ground between live-action and animation.
You need to be completely objective about the best possible format for your story. Do not force a concept into a traditional live-action box just because that feels like a safer path to a sale. The current market actively punishes boring choices.
The Brutal Math of Indie Production
The independent film market is a bloodbath right now. Look at the acquisition numbers from the 2024 and 2025 festival circuits. Roughly 65% of indie sales went to projects with highly specific genre hooks or wild stylistic swings. Straightforward indie comedies are virtually unsellable to streamers. Buyers want undeniable hooks. You have to give them something they can easily market on a busy home screen.
A farce about a guy losing his memory is a tough pitch in 2026. A farce about a guy losing his memory starring puppets is a headline.
Exploit Your Back Catalog
Stop throwing away your old material. Bressack is dusting off a story from 2009.
Scripts do not expire. The market simply moves away from certain genres and then inevitably circles back years later. That pilot you wrote five years ago that got you a bunch of water-bottle tours but went nowhere is still an asset.
Rip it apart. Change the setting, adjust the medium, and update the themes. A good writer never lets a functional structural engine go to waste. You strip the car down for parts and build a better vehicle.
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According to THR, the industry has officially branded its most reliable streaming cash cow: the “white wine thriller.” Led by immensely profitable adaptations like Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies (HBO), Elin Hilderbrand’s The Perfect Couple (Netflix), and the 2025 Sarah Snook juggernaut All Her Fault (Peacock), these glossy, low-gore mysteries are built for adult women seeking affluent escapism. Buyers want them. Streamers need them. Understanding the distinction between a crisp, commercial white wine thriller and a heavy, traumatic red wine thriller will dictate exactly who buys your next script.
What the Hell is a White Wine Thriller?
They are everywhere. You know the vibe.
A wealthy woman in a $4,000 cashmere sweater stares out at the California coast. Someone is dead. Probably a terrible husband. The blood is minimal. The countertops are immaculate. And the audience is knocking back a Pinot Grigio while hitting “Next Episode.”
A white wine thriller is dark. It never punishes the viewer. [Think psychological tension over graphic dismemberment.] The body count stays low. Stakes revolve around class anxiety, betrayal, and buried secrets.
These shows are currently keeping streamers in the black. Peacock reached profitability in 2026 largely off the back of All Her Fault. It earned seven Emmy nominations. The formula works because it offers a contained mystery wrapped in aspirational real estate.
The Rules of the Pour
You want to sell one of these? Learn the mechanics.
First, curb your violence. A script featuring a serial killer stringing up victims in a basement belongs to a completely different genre. Keep the trauma emotional. The conflict needs to stem from marriages collapsing and perfect facades cracking.
Second, embrace the lifestyle porn. Viewers want a mystery, and they want to covet the protagonist’s kitchen island. Make the environment as seductive as the secret.
Third, center the female experience. Do not just throw a female lead into a standard detective plot. The mystery must exploit specifically female anxieties about motherhood, aging, and societal expectations.
Swapping for Red
Some buyers prefer a heavier pour. We call these red wine thrillers.
Think Amy Adams hallucinating her way through Sharp Objects. Think Liz Meriwether and Emmy Rossum’s brutal 2026 Hulu series Furious, where an Epstein-style victim systemically takes out her abusers.
A red wine thriller leaves a stain. The themes are darker, the body count is higher, and the psychological toll is severe.
You need to know your buyer, and Peacock and Hulu are actively hunting for crisp, breezy white wine thrillers. Netflix and HBO Max are willing to buy a punishing red. So you should pitch accordingly.
The Danger of the Label
Labels sell scripts, and they also kill them.
Once a network slaps a cheeky moniker on a genre, they start tracking inventory. A buyer will pass on your brilliant script simply because they already bought their female thriller for the quarter.
Use the terminology in your pitch. It shows you understand the marketplace, but just make sure your script actually delivers something fresh within those rigid boundaries. Give them the affluent beach house and the cheating husband. Then flip the table.
Stop Writing for the Screen
Start writing for the audience’s living room.
Television is an intimate medium. People watch these shows to unwind. They want to feel smart for guessing the killer. They refuse to endure nightmares.
Calibrate your tone. Give the audience a reason to open a bottle, sit back, and judge rich people making terrible decisions. That is where the money is right now.
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Screenwriters don’t get to coast.
Whether you’re Jacob Tierney smashing two novels into a single TV season, or Patrick Ness cutting through pages of internal prose to find a feature film, the craft requires total focus. It takes real guts to look at a bestselling novel or a dead stage script and rewrite its future for the screen.
Keep grinding on your own pages. Take a bold formatting leap like the Bressacks, or calibrate your tone to write a crisp, marketable thriller. Build the blueprint, fix the mechanics, and own your place as the true architect of the story.
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