GoodBetter An actress who can't get cast starts a PI agency to pay for acting class, hiring a classmate to play the detective while she runs the show from behind the scenes. Their best skill? Going undercover.
He Plays the Detective, But She's the Brains of the Operation
Jenny Calhoun can become anyone. That’s what makes her a great actress. It’s also what makes her a surprisingly effective private investigator.
She’s broke, she can’t get cast, and the only marketable skill on her resume is the insurance investigation work she did for her uncle back in Nebraska. So she opens a PI agency in LA. One problem: nobody wants to hire a twenty-something woman to solve their problems. She recruits Mike Sawyer, an older classmate from acting class and a former highway patrolman, to play the role of lead detective while she runs everything behind the scenes.
Neither of them has any idea what they’re doing. But they’re trained actors, and going undercover is just another role. They talk their way past closed doors, slip into characters on the fly, and stumble through cases with more charm than expertise. Between jobs, they’re still auditioning, still taking classes, still getting rejected. The PI work might be the closest either of them ever gets to a paying performance.
The comedy writes itself, but Jenny is holding it all together with duct tape. She can become anyone on command, which is great for undercover work and terrible for knowing who she actually is. The confidence is a costume. The imposter syndrome is real. And the better she gets at pretending, the harder it gets to stop.
Quotes from Script Coverage
What a fabulous pilot script!!! I would 100% watch this show, it's captivating, funny, and makes the reader want to go on these adventures with Mike and Jenny!!
Wow, I had SO much fun reading this script!
Honestly, I love everything about it and if you changed nothing, I would still TOTALLY want to see this on the screen.
I laughed out loud while reading it.
The pilot moves well and is consistently engaging, the characters are so likeable (I'm already invested to see what happens and what shenanigans they get into!), the dialogue is compelling, and it's overall funny as heck.
GoodBetter wastes no time getting to the meat of its premise, dispensing entirely with context and delving into the central duo's relationship and the procedural work that's poised to be the focus of the series.
Thanks to the individual charisma of Jenny and Mike and their magnetism as a duo, the script's knack for coaxing humor out of unremarkable circumstances and its unwillingness to let its ambitions outstrip its well-cultivated means, the piece recalls the intrinsic allure of MONK or PSYCH without forcing itself to use those stories' often broad brushes.
Mike's unconventional personality and his camaraderie with Jenny create an endearing dynamic that draws us further into their world.