To be honest, there isn't much to Final Draft on the surface. What make it essential is what is under the hood. The automatic formatting it does for screenplays and teleplays has become so expected that rare, if ever, is it that we stop to think about how backwards writing screenplays was thirty years ago. I can't imagine having to write a movie or commercial using a typewriter or word processor. Final Draft takes something that, without item would be time consuming, and allows the writer to simply type their story.