A commissioner receives a new episode draft on Thursday and has to send notes by Monday. Somewhere in those 60 pages is a character who was in Glasgow in episode two and is suddenly in Cardiff, but nobody has told the commissioner, and the commissioner script notes that go back to the producer are only as good as what one tired reader caught on one pass.
That is the case for script analysis tools in commissioning: not to replace the commissioner's judgement, but to make sure that judgement is spent on story, tone and risk rather than on spotting slips. This piece is about what better commissioner script notes depend on, and what a tool that only reads, and never writes, can usefully contribute.
What commissioner script notes are actually for
In UK television, development is a loop of drafts, meetings, notes and rewrites. The craft of giving those notes is well documented; the BFI's We Have Some Notes collects practitioners' views on how to give and receive them productively. Broadly, commissioning at UK broadcasters moves from pitch through development to a formal commission, with scripts and bibles read at several points along the way.
Notes at this stage do three jobs. They protect the idea (is this still the show we agreed to make?), they manage risk (will this cost more, run longer or land badly?) and they keep the writer's room moving. Each job starts from the same place: an accurate picture of what is on the page.
The trouble is that the page is long, the schedule is short, and the picture is usually assembled from memory.
Where commissioner script notes go wrong
Most weak notes are not weak because the commissioner lacks taste. They are weak because of what was missed or misremembered.
- Continuity drift. A character's age, injury, job or allegiance changes between drafts or episodes without anyone deciding it should.
- Silent revisions. A new draft arrives and the changes are not flagged. The commissioner re-reads scenes that have not moved and misses the ones that have.
- Bible contradictions. The series bible says one thing; episode four quietly assumes another.
- Format noise. Inconsistent scene headings, character names spelled three ways, missing transitions. None of it matters creatively, and all of it distracts.
A commissioner who has to hunt for these is not reading as an audience member would. They are proofreading, and proofreading crowds out the questions only a commissioner can ask.
What a read-only analysis layer can do
A script analysis tool earns its place by doing the checking that does not need taste, and doing it the same way every time. For commissioners, the useful behaviours are modest and specific:
- Surface what changed. Between drafts, show which scenes moved, so the reader's attention goes there first.
- Surface what contradicts. Flag where a character, place or fact differs from earlier episodes or the bible, and show both lines side by side so a human can decide whether it is an error or an intentional change.
- Stay out of the writing. The output is a list of things to look at, never a suggested rewrite. Notes belong to people.
The last point matters most. A tool that writes or rewrites dialogue changes who owns the script, and writers and commissioners have good reason to be wary of that. A tool that only reads leaves authorship exactly where it was. (CONT'D is built on that principle: it reads and analyses screenplays, and does not write them.)
It also needs to read the format people actually use. Final Draft's .fdx is an XML-based format that is widely used to exchange screenplays between applications, which means structure such as scene headings, character cues and dialogue can be read directly rather than guessed from a PDF.
A practical routine for sharper notes
You do not need new software to improve notes today, though better tooling helps. Try this on the next draft:
- Read for story first, once, without a pen. Note your gut reaction before any checking.
- Then check continuity separately. Keep a running list of facts per character: where they are, what they know, what has happened to them. Compare against the previous draft.
- Separate "error" from "decision" in your notes. "Mara's scar is on the left here and the right in episode two" is a query. "I'm not convinced by Mara's turn" is a note. Mixing them makes both easier to ignore.
- Send queries early, notes later. Factual queries can go to the script editor straight away and be resolved before the creative conversation.
A tool that produces the continuity list for you simply makes step two quicker and more consistent.
In summary
Commissioner script notes improve when the commissioner is reading for story and risk, not hunting for slips. A read-only analysis layer helps by surfacing what changed and what contradicts, while leaving every creative decision, and every word of the script, with people. CONT'D is currently in a closed pilot focused on checking continuity before table reads, so this is a direction we are testing with production teams rather than a finished promise.
If you would like to follow that work, join the waitlist at https://contd.app/waitlist.