Paging Dr. Hook

I saw a commercial first on Pluto TV and then on Paramount+ for this animated show called The Harper House and every time I watch it, I think the same thing:  where is the hook?  (I looked for the commercial on YouTube but I can't find it.  Maybe Phantom Readers saw it on CBS, Pluto TV, Paramount+ or whatever.)

By that I mean there's really nothing in the ad that makes me want to watch the show.  From what I can tell it's an animated show about a family moving into some old crappy house and fixing it up.  Are there ghosts in the house?  Apparently not.  Are there wacky neighbors?  None that are evident.  Is the family a bunch of freaks or anything?  Well, I guess Mom's a drunk but otherwise, not really evident either.  On top of that at the end it uses that "Our House" song that's been used in like dozens of ads in the last 30 years.

Maybe it is a good, funny show, but the commercial just doesn't do anything for me and I really don't want to waste time watching it just to see if it can justify lame marketing.

And then that got me thinking about query letters all of us writers send out.  Those queries are like commercials for our books.  And if you want an agent's intern to notice, you need some kind of hook, right?  So if your query is as bland as that Harper House commercial, the person reading it is probably going to be thinking the same thing I am when I'm watching the commercial:  where is the hook?

If you have some great hook, you need to make sure you communicate that in your query as soon as possible.  It's not something you want to save until later.  I know when I was in writer's groups online, sometimes you'd get someone who wouldn't want to "spoil" some big plot twist in their query.  But if you don't spoil anything, you're never going to get anyone who's going to read the thing you're wanting not to spoil.

In the case of that Harper House show, from this other video on YouTube I guess it's kind of an Arrested Development/Schitt's Creek deal where the family was rich but now they're poor and moving to the other side of the tracks.  Not a great hook, but better than in the commercial they're showing on TV.

Recently on Facebook someone linked to a YouTube video showing Mike Judge's pitch video for King of the Hill back in 1996 or so and it was pretty good.  Hank Hill talks directly to the Fox execs, introducing them to his wife, who's a Spanish teacher who doesn't have a great grasp of Spanish, his son who isn't very bright, his niece who also isn't very bright, and his friends/neighbors who again are not very bright.  So besides that he already created the infamous Beavis & Butthead, it would give you an idea of what the show is about.

I suppose in 2021 it's not as great of a pitch because there are so many adult animated shows (like the one above) but in 1996 or so there was really just The Simpsons and some other failures like Capitol Critters or The Critic--the latter I like but it never caught on.  That's a whole other issue about hooks:  timing is everything.  Pitching your animated family comedy in 1996 vs 2021 there's a huge difference and in 2021 the need for a hook is more than ever before because there's so many more similar shows already on Fox, Cartoon Network, and the various streaming services.

Comparatively it's like if you pitched a vampire story in 1996 there were still quite a few but in 2021 there are far, far more of those, so if you're pitching a vampire story there needs to be some kind of hook that makes it stand out from the hundreds of other vampire books that are being queried to that same agent.  If your query is just another story about sexy sparkly vampires then the agent's intern will probably yawn and push the button for the next email.

I guess in the end that's the problem with this Harper House thing:  there's just nothing that makes it stand out from the literally dozens of other similar shows.  The only thing that did stand out is how it doesn't stand out.

 UPDATE:  The show has been cancelled by Paramount+, so nailed it!