My wife and I were having an interesting discussion the other night, so I quickly turned on the TV and we both breathed a sigh of relief. After what seemed an age of the TV shouting at us and trying to sell us stuff A Current Affair finally went to a commercial break and the summer promos started.
One thing about summer programming is that it’s much less predictable than regular programming. You can easily stumble across a viewing of 1988’s Coming To America and not see it repeated until at least the following week.
Summer programming also involves lots of promos with slow motion and the word “DRAMA” appearing in bold graphics every so often to remind you not to laugh. As I was sitting there watching the word DRAMA slowly move toward me, I realised I’d seen pretty much all these shows before. Re-imagined, re-booted, re-told, re-whatever, they are all old shows that are now being sold as new. Channel 7 has even re-booted the tennis again.
It’s easy to pitch a new TV show. Ready? Sherlock Holmes but New York. See? Let’s try again. Law and Order but somewhere else. You just take an existing program and change it a little, but not too much so as to ruin the precious formula.
All the above TV shows actually exist and I like to imagine they were pitched to network executives exactly as I have just done. If a modern day Sherlock Holmes is possible then there’s no reason we can’t have Mulder and Scully but in Victorian-era London and Scully is a man. I call it X Files: London Victorian Era but Scully is a Man.
I’m not surprised at the lack of originality. Conservative business and television have long been associated with one another. I’m just worried that before long TV will become one big mash-up of previous successful shows, re-booted and re-imagined into one single show in which Matt Preston has to solve crimes using forensic science and an expert panel of superheroes.
Yet, there is still hope for original programming and with that in mind, if there are any television executives reading this I would like to pitch some ideas for what I think will be some of the most original and groundbreaking television ever made.
Underbelly: Misdemeanor
A family man refuses to pay a parking ticket and is issued with a $2500 fine. After claiming he lost the BPAY details he is forced to set up a payment plan on top of the infringement notice. This causes tension within the home.
The Joey Theory
Joey from Friends moves next door to two socially awkward physicists. Noticing that the physicists only ever hang out with their other two nerdy friends, mainly playing video games and reading comic books, Joey makes it his goal to show them how to pick up girls and take party drugs. In Season 2 Joey’s friend Chandler moves in.
So You Wanna Be Somebody Else?
A panel of judges consisting of Keith Urban, Paris Hilton and Pauly Shore oversee a series of auditions of some of the world’s most boring and untalented people in search of earth’s most worthless individual. The lucky winner will undergo extensive plastic surgery, a series of electric shock therapies, hormone replacement therapy, experimental medication and piano lessons that will change their life and who they are forever.
Prost!
Set in East Berlin in the 1980’s, ex-professional football player and wisecrack Sam Mueller manages a bar in the city. It revolves around Sam’s on-again-off-again relationships with the waitresses and follows the lives of the regulars that drink at the bar, affectionately known as the place where everybody knows your name (because they are all KGB).
M*A*S*H #4078
Just like the original but Radar is a woman, Korea is Afghanistan.
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