When a botched spell resurrects their evil mother?s dead boyfriend as a sentient zombie, two supernatural teens, must keep their paranormal family a secret while living in a pleasant suburbs. (Series)
Eli TeirelinckPenpusher
When a botched spell resurrects their evil mother?s dead boyfriend as a sentient zombie, two supernatural teens, must keep their paranormal family a secret while living in a pleasant suburbs. (Series)
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Lots going on in this one concept – the logline raises more questions than information it provides.?
Why must they keep the family secret?
What does a supernatural teen mean?
Can they not just kill the sentient zombie mother and problem solved?
The goal of keeping their family secret a secret is a vague goal, how will they know they have succeeded? What is the definitive objective they need to achieve in order to know the secrete is still a secret?
For a series it’s best to draft a logline for the pilot episode instead of for the series as a whole.
A botched spell? What were they trying to do? Who’s spell? Is this a witch story or a zombie story? Head the logline with your protagonists and their sympathetic flaws–
“When two mourning teens find their undead mother back on their doorstep, they must…”
The only thing I see that needs fixing is pleasant suburb is meaningless as a description. ?Perhaps give it a location.
Series logline is is not a story it is a universe that you can write many stories in.
Honestly, I think this story would work better if the person they resurrected was someone they cared about.
Now they must keep it a secret because they don’t want anyone to hurt the person.
But the person they resurrected keeps eating the brains of their neighbors.
“Mom! Why did you eat Timmy’s brains!”
“I was hungry… plus Timmy’s always been a little brat.”
-My mother’s a zombie-
The questions I raised in my original post were meant to highlight points of confusion in the logline, you may know the answer to these in your head but they were not coming through in the logline.
Despite your efforts to answer my questions, the causal connection between the events is still vague. As a result of resurrecting their mother’s dead boyfriend they don’t NEED to keep the family secret, they would have had to do so anyhow with or without the zombie boyfriend. Sure it’s an obstacle of sorts, but one does not necessitate the other.
Further more, if they are truly scared for their lives, care about their family, the boyfriend was evil and dead then the logical move is to kill him instead of caring for him. They put all of themselves at risk – keeping him zombie alive just doesn’t make sense.
Your welcome to either take my advise on this or not, but series are best pitched with the pilot – you need a cracker of a pilot logline to catch a producer’s attention.
This concept mixes many known types of super natural beings, but that’s not working in my mind. Best to specify one type of super natural being the main characters will be, otherwise it feels more of a mish-mash of super natural stuff than a purpose driven family of characters.
Look at I-Zombie a good show that dealt with zombies, all the subplots and support cast came about as a result of the main character being a zombie. Buffy fought vampires and the later spin-offs fought demons, again we see that good series really focus on their character’s specifics and use them as the basis for the plots.
If you wish to keep the multitude of super natural types, then best to devise a premise that justifies a mix of super natural characters. In X-Men there were many characters with different super-powers, but not one particular power was the main focus of the series. In X-Men they made sure to devise a premise that justified, if not called for, all types of super powers under the sun.
Ultimately your writing about subject matter that is very trendy, which means it has a good chance of selling down the line. As it stands however, the flawed basic logic and lack of causality are working against the concept. Best to simplify – choose one main character, clearly define him or her and structure a plot around a single objective for them to achieve in the pilot. It’s the story in the pilot that will demonstrate what subsequent episodes will look like.