Phantom started a thread like this in MC and it seems to be getting played mostly for laughs so i wanted to reboot over here for serious answers. Seems more like the feedback would be more productive for the serious answers in this room. here's what I posted there... Feedback very welcome. I'll add the others which seem to be serious over there as well.
You have show ideas? I also have a show idea. See http://thedreadknot.tripod.com/ I think Fox would pick up the second one. The third would be a Lifetime hit.
I hope you're not thinking of using the real town as the setting, because it's really nothing to write home about. I'm puzzled as to why the Doobies chose to write a song about it in the first place...
Nah. Couldn't have proved by me that there was a real town...figure they just pulled it off a map. I would assume there wouldn't be legal issues with the use of the name but the town would be no more real than Knots Landing or whatever...
something else from the other thread.... That's actually a pretty cool concept. made me think of the one I wanted in my post and couldn't remember... i'd like the idea of a series based on The Question....Jeff Combs in a animated - or even live action - series about the ultimate consperacy nut...who just happens to be right... he'd need a flakey sidekick/secretary like the Teri Garr role in Assignment: Earth...could be lots of fun with the right writer....what's Tim Miner doing nowdays?
Shadow how about Wing Commander: Privateer think firefly with hundreds of systems wer ehumanity is at war with a cat race.
Because McMinessonchester-on-Thames doesn't roll off the tounge so well - and forget about Ausgettenschlusterhoffenberg.
Dan Simmon's Hyperion Cantos would be best done as a TV series, IMO. Enough material there for a season or two. That'd give it enough time to actually dwell into all the plots/characters/settings in the books to the depth they deserve. Of course, it'll never happen. So, I'll propose a bastardization of it--picture a very similar universe, where humanity has expanded to planets ranging across hundreds of light-years, primarily via the use of Farcaster portals. These portals are so ubiquitous that they exist even as doorways in private homes. People routine LIVE/WORK/PLAY on multiple planets. Instantaneous galactic travel is as commonplace and unthought of as breathing--until it is gone. Obviously, the series would focus on the hardships of the characters as they deal with their newfound isolation: their attempts to reunite with loved ones spread across ridiculous distances, those stranded on non-self-sufficient worlds struggling w/ the logistics of basic food/water/shelter needs, the assorted politics of those inspired to fill the newfound Power Vacuum, etc.... Would need a big ensemble cast to populate the several post-calamity-newly-isolated worlds. I figured the focus would have to be limited to 3-4 of those worlds, but the beauty is that other worlds/characters could be added to plotlines as time goes on and the show becomes a hit and gets extended multiple seasons.
Agent Cross Howard Cross is a scarred man. On the palms of his hands are scars that form a cross which he recieved during a fire in a church when he was a child and grabbed a crucifix that was too hot from the fire. After he he had become as postman he was married, his wife was killed by a drunk driver. Two years later she came back as an undead ghoul and tied the entire family down and began to mutilate his children in front of his eyes, eating them alive. He was not abloe to save his childrens lives but was able to escape his bonds, then he was able to channel some sort of power through his scars which destroyed his wife's body. He was arrested and because people don't believe in undead monsters he was thought to have committed the crime and was sent to prison for a long time. There he was taught how to fight to survive. He was released seven years later on a technicality. He has been a homeless bum ever since but wherever he goes he runs into the influence of the uindead and combates them where he can, using the power he was given.
Survivor: Wordforge: A team of Anonymous Propertarians is matched in debate against Those Who Post under Their RL Names. Topic to be preselected by both teams before they're transported to the island. Ad hominem attacks result in immediate elimination. No, on second thought, scratch that. Competition would be over before the first commercial break. Though maybe the rest of the pilot could be devoted to watching the Propertarians try to swim for the mainland, having refused to cooperate in building a raft. First Propertarian: "Git yer own goddamn log! I cut this one down with my own teeth, and I ain't sharing!" Second Propertarian reaches for semi-automatic, remembers he wasn't allowed to bring it, stands there completely flummoxed.
Transhumanity. An exploration of the effect on technology on humankind in the near future, each arc focusing on an aspect of societal change that derives from our accumulated brilliance. Multiple self-reinforcing arcs. First arc - Shirts and Skins. Start in 2011, when the CIA finally nabs OBL, using a brilliant new innovation, RNA resequencing, which allows overt changes to the genome, such as pigmentation. The CIA finally gets a guy in OBL's mountain retreat because he finally passes the smell test. Hell, to make it fun make the guy a chinese muslim who does the deed out of idealism, in that he believes OBL's take on Islam is going to devastate the religion in the long run. Next ep, jump ahead a dozen years, when the RNA tech is going public, and people begin to change skin color at will. Tons of possibilities here - including job interviews, culture wars, the inevitable racism as a clan member is made black for a week by a judge with a queer sense of humor, etc etc. Don't play it merely PC though - looking at things like cultural assumptions in Asian communities and the divide between fair and dark skin blacks. After epsiode three, start working in other threads, such as direct genetic manipulation of embryonic traits by parents, the affect of the internet as it becomes miniaturized and omnipresent, the energy question and global warming, and the alterations in society due to increased communications. End of the first season - the creation of the first beyond human level intellect due to genetic manipulation.
Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex does a pretty good job. Course, they use prosthetics, and brain plugging, rather than gene stuff, but all the arcs are about politics, and counter-terrorist stuff.
Saw the original but not the sequels. Love cyberpunk, but it's pretty obvious now that the speculative fiction of that genre isn't going to be how our society evolves, though it was amazingly inventive in its time. But then, the next guy that comes along can say why bioware, gene sculpting and the omninet will no doubt be wrong, but they make for an interesting and relatively unexplored part of the scifi genre now. Transhumanism is the next big thing I think in scifi - people like Simmons, Brin, Vinge and Hamilton are just beginning to explore it. It's not quite so limited as Cyberpunk either, because there's a lot of ways you can achieve a transhuman society. The counterpoint between the balance of the singularity and the apocalypse is a great story telling tool.
Ah, probably my favorite and first exposure to it was Sid Meier - one of the ways to win Alpha Centauri was to imprint your neural net on the planetary consciousness of Planet. That was what, '98? Very, very cool.
One of the things that I thought would work for good storytelling, if I had enough of an imgination for plots, is this: Suppose there was a culture that somehow perfected a machine similar to the transporter in star trek....except that you were not tied to the physical patern coming out that you went in with. you could, for instance, dematerialze at 70 and rematerialize as your 20 year old self physically, but with your mind intact. you could change genders, races, hight or weight (if you needed extra mass you took it into the chamber with you, if you lost mass it would be collected elsewhere)...image a bunch of groupies copying the look of their favorite celbrity...imagine laws that provided for you copywriting your pperance so that it could not be imitated (say a vein sort like Clooney gets a copywright so it's illegal to look like him). We assume for the purpose of this that it's inexpensive enough that the common man could use it, but expensive enough you couldn't put on a new look every day when you got out of the shower. How would you identify the individual when s/he kept changing? A biochip that had to be implanted every time you left the chamber? Seems to me that's a world with tons of possibilities once you get past th actual improbability of the device. But not so much fit for a TV series probably. This is out of my "maybe someday" pile of ideas that i don't have the confidence to even play with yet.
Meh, cyber-brain swapping would be cheaper than a transporter change, and do the same thing. And GITS does that too.
Stand Alone Complex is the series. It's on Adult Swim. They expand on the themes of the movie an awful lot. And yeah, the vision of the tech in cyberpunk is very 80's, but gene splicing, bionics, either way, you'd end up with X-Men powers. Anyway, thy kinda knew this, and for the show, they've retro-updated the tech so that the cyber-bodies have nanotech in them to bridge the gap between the metal and flesh. Sort of a middle compromise, they could've gone all organic, but then it wouldn't be Ghost in the Shell. Well, check out GITS: SAC sometime, you might dig it.
that one woud require two willing partners (criminality aside) and would mean that there ws never more than one "original" one way to do it, but limits your stories.
Oh no, see, in GITS, you can buy totally synthetic cyber bodies. They've got artificial blood, muscles, digestive and sexual organs, there's really no difference. But yeah, sometimes there's body theft too.
