OK. So you want to amp up your drama, your conflicts, your stakes.
There’s this one thing you should stop doing: Justifying your protag’s bad behavior and letting him off the hook for it.
Spec scripts have this incredible enabling parent mode towards their protagonists, and there are different reasons for it, but they’re all weak.
As a for instance, it’s set up that a character needs a lot of money, so they decide to rob a bank, but the plot point is that the protag meets the love interest at the bank and the plot goes in another direction.
The writer, knowing that the robbery will never take place, completely ignores the fact that THE CHARACTER WAS ABOUT TO ROB A BANK. There are things about that that really need to be addressed if you’re going to use it. Think about it.
Another for instance is that the character does some shitty thing but the script pretzels itself to assure us that he’s not a BAD PERSON!!! Yes, he is a bad person and that’s what the script is about, him realizing that he qualifies as a bad person for this behavior, and overcoming that and changing, even if it means huge sacrifices. That’s what the catharsis is.
When you conceive your story, don’t do it out of blind, unconditional love for your protag. If they do something awful, don’t explain it away or pretend that there was a good enough reason that it doesn’t need to be addressed.
When you do that, you’re brushing your drama right under the rug.