Here's a question I wanted to pose to a writer today: Does the place your lead works require the rest of their staff to be slightly dumb? Or is it that you require all characters that orbit around your lead to be dumb so that we can all understand how smart he is?
The I.Q. test. It isn't applied to your lead, it's applied to secondary characters. Making them dumber does not make the lead smarter. It makes the script vapid.
Audiences like smart characters but they don't grade on a curve.
