In the Oakland Post writing room: Saving the fall TV season
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Photo by Jason Willis
(Deep in the cavernous basement of the Oakland Center, editors Rory McCarty and Dan Fenner set out to right the wrongs of TV Land this fall)
DAN: Prime time television is a travesty, Rory.
RORY: Damn straight, Dan. You and I could come up with more original garbage than this garbage.
DAN: Half of it is reality TV and the other half is unreality TV. And the third half is unrealistic shows pretending to be reality shows.
RORY: Well, let’s look at the fall lineup. For a start, we’ve got “The Whole Truth,” “Body of Proof” and the sixteenth iteration of “Law & Order.” Those are shows about a lawyer, a doctor, and a cop, respectively.
DAN: This is probably just because all television executives have an unresolved occupational crisis stemming from lost childhood dreams and parental disappointment when they opted to pursue writing and acting over med school.
RORY: But Dan, it’s about the audience! People never EVER grow tired of shows about cops. They could make shows about police, lawyers and doctors year after year and still sell enough Geico commercials to buy a fleet of yachts. And then have a yacht fight just for fun.
You only need to throw a slight twist into each show to keep the viewing public from getting wise. “It’s a lawyer show, but it’s also about an independent woman! It’s a police show, but they talk to ghosts to solve their murders! It’s a doctor show, but one of the doctors is John Stamos somehow.”
DAN: Rory, I think we need to be looking at the bigger picture here. These shows are gold mines — sure things, right? What if we just roll them all together?
Try this. Geena Davis plays a smart, independent single mother who works as a beat cop in the daytime. She shoots suspects dead, uses her clairvoyance to get a confession out of their ghost, uses her paramedic abilities to bring them back to life, and then becomes a night lawyer to prosecute them. And John Stamos is the judge.
RORY: You’re going somewhere brilliant with this, Dan. But why stop there? Imagine: the singing high school stylings of the “Glee” kids mixed with, say, the vampires from “True Blood.”
Most TV viewers are tired of watching whiny, pale twenty-somethings. I’ve basically lived that already. The whole vampire obsession has grown tired. But singing, sexy vampires? Delicious.
DAN: We’re on fire with this, Rory. How about we go for broke? Let’s go ahead and merge all dramas on CBS into one. When it comes right down to it, they’re all basically the same exact show with different actors. Am I supposed to be surprised when each episode’s mystery wraps up all tidily in exactly 60 minutes?
RORY: Brilliant idea just now. What if we take the aging reporters of “60 Minutes,” and make them into vampires? Investigative journalism is about to get a lot more interesting. Plus: Vampire Andy Rooney complains about the shoddy craftsmanship in modern coffins.
DAN: Rory, take another Adderall and look at this. Have you seen “Detroit 1-8-7?” Another homicide show, but the hook this time is that it takes place in a city that isn’t New York. I think they’ve got the wrong idea, though. Detroit should really have its own reality show; all the ingredients are there already to make the next Jersey Shore. You want to watch a dysfunctional group of people bicker about nothing of importance? Sit through a Detroit City Council meeting.
RORY: I would take it a step further. I see Detroit’s administration as the next “Arrested Development.” We’ve had a mayor who refuses to take responsibility, a police chief who desperately wants to get his own reality show, and a head of the public school board who can’t read.
DAN: Here’s something that never fails: (1) Take a British TV show. (2) Rip it off wholesale. (3) Scrub out any hints of foreign influence. (4) Make yourself a money hat.
This process has been proven to work with “The Office,” “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” It seems to work even better when the show’s name asks a rhetorical question.
RORY: It’s a scientifically documented fact that a group of Americans can watch an episode of “Top Gear” in focus testing and enjoy it, but the instant someone refers to a cookie as a biscuit, chairs are thrown, windows are smashed and hysterical irrationality breaks out.
DAN: Wait, wait, wait. Let’s back up. We need to be looking for inspiration outside of the box. There’s a show now based on some guy’s Twitter feed. William Shatner is acting out someone’s tweets! Anything we come up with can’t be stupider than that.
RORY: How about a show based on the instruction manual for my stereo? The first half is pretty slow, but then — twist! — the rest of the show is in Spanish! Where did that come from?
DAN: Let’s go further off the beaten path. Sure, “Nip/Tuck” gave us plastic surgeons and “C.S.I.” brought the world of sexy forensics detective people into our living rooms, but give me something with a little more depth and a little less severed body parts.
RORY: Severed hands are decidedly unsexy.
DAN: All right, lightning round. Throw out the first thing that comes into mind.
RORY: By day, Jeff Goldblum is a real estate agent trying to earn his next big commission. By night, he’s a serial killer who hides his victims in the houses he sells. I call it, “Home Bodies.”
DAN: “It’s Raining Cats and Dogs.” To help wounded animals in war zones, a team of veterinarians train as paratroopers.
RORY: A ventrloquist dummy comes to life and begins training to become a proctologist. The title: “Hey, Get Your Hand Out Of My Ass.”
DAN: Who would possibly play the dummy? Who most resembles a block of wood? I vote for Sam Worthington.
RORY: The everyday life of a train conductor, played by Ray Romano, features his musings on life, the decline of rail transport, and the meaninglessness of his existence. “My Life on Rails.”
DAN: “Crossing the Aisle.” Former presidential candidates John McCain and John Edwards end up sharing a one bedroom, half bathroom, garden level apartment together. One’s the straight-laced, grumpy old man, the other’s the young, wild party animal. Can they get along in the city?
RORY: Quick, give me a location.
DAN: Pffft — Des Moines.
RORY: “The Real Housewives of Des Moines.”
DAN: Oh! “Survivor: Des Moines!” The person who gets voted out must leave the cornfield.
RORY: This is harder than I thought.
DAN: Yeah, you’re right. Maybe we should leave this to the professionals.
RORY: Let’s just watch some reruns of American Idol.
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