What if 2020 is just a bad movie?

If all the crazy stuff that's happening in the world right now were a show, what kind of show would it be? It could be a comedy, tragedy, dystopian thriller, political saga, legal drama, medical procedural, apocalyptic fiction, horror or satire — or all of those rolled into one.

But mostly, what it has is a completely bonkers plot. Remember all the stuff that has happened this year: the virus, the lockdowns, George Floyd, the massive civil rights marches, the conflagration of the American West, the destruction of the American economy, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Brexit. Whistleblowers. Superspreaders. Murder hornets!

Five screenwriters were asked what they'd do with this script: how they'd shape it into something watchable, and how they think it should end (not necessarily how they think it will end or how they'd want it to end, mind you).

Spoilers — maybe — follow.

Looking at the endless daily twists and subplots of the 2020 script, our experts have some feedback.

"I would say to this screenwriter, 'Whoa, slow down,' " said Eli Attie, a writer for NBC's "The West Wing." "Like, show us who the people are, or draw out and take out some of these plot events, and let the one story breathe."

Bruce Miller, the showrunner of "The Handmaid's Tale" on Hulu, said that when he writes, he tries to "give people enough time to actually thoughtfully process something complicated." In 2020, he continues, "We have so many complicated things that are very hard to process, and they're coming one after another."

Even though 2020 has had a lot of jaw-dropping twists, "It doesn't feel like it has the sort of narrative structure that we expect of TV," said Dan Schofield, a writer and producer of NBC's "The Good Place." "Even bad TV tends to offer resolution."

What kind of show are we living through, anyway?

"There's ways in which this would be a black comedy or a drama or a satire," said Schofield, but it depends on how you narrow your focus: When it comes to COVID-19, "I haven't yet found a ton of humor in the disease."

Maybe a dystopian thriller? Miller, of "The Handmaid's Tale," isn't convinced.

"We were sold, through entertainment, an idea that dystopia was going to be exciting," he said. "And it's been so boring."

You might think President Donald Trump would be a good character to center a show on. Our screenwriting experts disagree.

"You can't get inside him," Attie said. "He doesn't have the same inner life, emotional life, as a three-dimensional character that you want to write about. I don't know how to make that interesting. It's not nuanced. It's not contradictory. He's not at war with himself."

Kang sees slightly more possibility for nuance in the Trump character. "If you wanted to write a story where the president was sort of a sympathetic anti-hero figure, you could absolutely do that," she said.

Still, a writer might do better to center the plot action on someone else.

"Often your leading character is the audience," Attie said. "It's a vessel through which the audience can put themselves in the story and see what's happening."

"I would certainly use the point of view of a young woman of color," he said. "It seems like that person is going through the biggest, most interesting perspective on history, I think. Someone who is just trying to grow up in the world and get their life started."

"This is a year that's so crazy that literally, actual government footage of a UFO was declassified, and nobody talked about it," Coker said.

Then there were the "murder hornets," aka Asian giant hornets. They flew into the plot this spring, adding an extra layer of Old Testament energy to a country already addled by disease. Their presence might have been overhyped. But if this were a TV series. ...

"That's the kind of thing where you just drop a mention of it somewhere in an episode, and then you forget about it," Kang said. "And then it's supposed to come back at the end of the season in some unexpected way."

There was the toilet paper hoarding. And the events of late September and early October, a period in which Ginsburg died, the contents of Trump's tax returns were revealed, the disastrous first presidential debate occurred and the president and many of his staff members tested positive for the coronavirus. The revelation that Amy Coney Barrett, the conservative judge nominated to replace Ginsburg, once held the title of "handmaid" in a Christian group was a particularly strange clash of reality and fiction for Miller, the "Handmaid's Tale" writer.

We're almost up to the last episode. So the challenge for these writers and showrunners is: Given everything that has happened so far, how does it end?

In screenwriting, as in life, there isn't an easy answer.

Schofield thinks it will be hard to wrap up all the loose ends of this year in any meaningful or satisfying way. It makes him think of the "it was just a dream" trope, or the famous ending of "St. Elsewhere," which ended with the camera pulling back to reveal that the hospital drama took place inside a snow globe and was perhaps the figment of an autistic child's imagination.

Or maybe the writers would need to rely on a deus ex machina. "The murder hornets come in," Schofield spitballed. "The aliens come in simultaneously with the seas [rising]. The wildfires come in from every corner. You know, human nature is extinguished. That seems to be the only possible way to tie up all the loose ends."