Yesterday’s launch event for the Science and Entertainment Exchange was a smashing success. The enthusiasm of everyone in the room was palpable, especially on the Hollywood side — these folks would love to be interacting more closely with scientists on a regular basis. (Let me pause to give a plug for Eleventh Hour, a show which I haven’t actually seen yet, but whose writers were complaining that they sometimes take grief for being too scientifically accurate.) I came away from the symposium with lots of new ideas, and also a deep-seated fear of our coming robot masters.
So, in honor of the new program, we hereby announce the Cosmic Variance Elevator Pitch Contest. I don’t know about you, but many folks I know with an interest in science take great pleasure in complaining about the embarrassing lack of realism and respect for the laws of nature apparent in so many movies and TV shows. Here’s your (fictional) chance to do something about it.
Opening scene: you step into an elevator at the headquarters of CBS/Paramount Television in Hollywood. (Unclear why you are there — perhaps to have lunch with your more-successful friend from high school, who works for their legal team.) There is only one other person in the elevator with you for the journey to the top floor — and it’s Les Moonves, President and CEO of CBS! (Again, unclear why he is taking the same elevator as you — we’ll fix that in post-production.)
Here is the perfect opportunity for your elevator pitch.
You have thirty seconds — which, as this blog is still a text-based medium, we’ll approximate as strictly 100 words or less — to pitch your idea for a new TV show that is based on science. It can be an hour drama, a half-hour sitcom, a reality show, game show, documentary, science fiction, whatever you like. For example:
I have an idea for a show called Cosmic Variance. It’s about seven scientists who blog during the day, but at night they fight crime! And to do it, they used advanced notions from modern physics and astrophysics, from adaptive optics to quantum decoherence. They’re young, they’re sexy, and they break hearts as they bust heads. But their university colleagues are already suspicious of their blogging, so they have to keep the crime-fighting activities completely secret. They have a deep underground lab where they carry out cutting-edge experiments, and there’s a canine sidekick named Sparky.
Okay, that’s a fairly silly example. I’m not eligible to win the contest. But you, the reader, are! So here are some of the ideas you want to keep in mind while polishing your pitch:
Most importantly: Les Moonves’s goal in life is not to make science look good. It’s to make money. So don’t pitch that this show would make the world a better place, or make science seem interesting; convince him that it’s exciting to everyone and will attract millions of eyeballs.
Use the science. For our purposes, we’re less interested in a show idea that tacks on some science to make things sound cool, as we are in a concept that couldn’t happen without the science.
Story is paramount. As much as we love accuracy and realism, there has to be a compelling narrative. You need to convince Moonves that people will be emotionally connected to the characters and their situation.
It’s easy to mock the efforts of others, but here’s a chance to see whether you could really put together a compelling show idea. Leave your entry in the comments. They will be judged by our crack team of scientists/bloggers/crime-fighters, and the winner will get a Cosmic Variance T-shirt. (We have plans to upgrade the quality of our current swag options.) Please note that there is not some hidden plan to actually make any TV shows out of this — we have no clout along those lines, so if you are a professional scriptwriter, don’t dump your plans out in public here on our blog. But if you’re a pro you already knew that.
And then: memorize your pitch! You never know when you might find yourself trapped in an elevator with the right person, and you have to be ready.
Oh, man. Agreed, this is tough. I mean, the whole baffling thing about Hollywood & TV’s apparent increased interest in scientific accuracy is that it’s seemingly very difficult to market. Nothing glows an eerie green, nothing levitates, there are few, if any, explosions, experiments take days to get results instead of seconds, everybody has pretty average looks, people with poor social skills actually aren’t very entertaining, etc. I’ve always assumed that the kind of stuff I could write, or would laud for its realism, would have such a limited audience no one would ever pick it up. I admit it: I’m nowhere near creative enough to keep it real and make a wide swath of the public happy. Unless, of course, a wide swath of the public has very different tastes than I assumed…
Ooops! Forgot to add “But I’ll give it a shot!”
Aw man, Sean! You stole my idea!
Except the dog was going to be called “Buttons”.
How about…
“Ow, my balls: A study of F=ma”
Just go for a mix of MXC and in between sessions explain exactly how hard the last person hit the door-that-turned-out-to-be-solid.
-34 words and out
Hi Sean, I’ll bite. Several people have approached me about hosting interesting science shows, but I haven’t had a chance to describe an idea I think would be good.
People don’t realize how much science goes into adventure sports and creating the accompanying gear. Over the years, I’ve had a chance to spend time with the inventors and athletes who make surfboards, snowboards, hang gliders, … and even see new sports invented, such as kitesurfing. This process of creation is all about science. Inventors think about what will and won’t work, make it, and test it — usually with a team of athletes to give feedback. It would be great to have a show where, for each episode, the host joined up with athletes and immersed themselves in a different adventure sport, including touring the workshops and talking science with the creators behind the gear. A fair amount of humor would come from the scientist-host as they tried out unfamiliar sports — a lot of things well understood in theory are incredibly difficult in practice. The show would be a hell of a lot of fun to do, and the audience could see how science works in a very practical, understandable, and entertaining way.
Best,
Garrett
So what if we had a Top Cancer Researcher show? The format would be pretty similar to Top Chef, except the quick challenges would be stuff like fastest/most accurate pipetting or fastest miniprep and the elimination challenges would be explaining the data they generated that day/week to a lay audience who would rate the contestants’ ability to explain the workings and significance of their work to the public. The judges could be the editors of Cell! Another option would be having lab groups compete instead of individuals, and you could compare things like the amount and quality of data they generate.
Survivor: Grad school.
Follow-up second season:
Survivor: Grad school:
Prelim preparation.
Take a handful of scientists, sit em’ at a table and have them talk about interesting scientific shit. If it’s kind of boring, give em’ beer.
A faux reality show that’s really a scripted comedy. Contestants are God, a super computer simulating the universe, and a Boltzmann Brain, all living together in a huge flat. Each week, they pit their respective universes against each other in a contest to win intellectual currency in the minds of the viewing public.
When I read the title, I thought it was like the “bathroom stall pitch”. You know, when you’re in the stall make a humming noise until you get resonance from the walls, allowing you to measure the size of the stall? Oh well, just another science geek here, I guess.
New Horizons.
Takes place about a century from now. Humanity has long since discovered that planets around other stars harbor life. We send out a ship to colonize a new world. This ship is a generation ship, where multiple generations of intrepid explorers will be born and die before it reaches its destination. This show follows their journey, where they are faced with mechanical failure, collisions with small dust grains that cause lots of damage, and people who just can’t take being trapped on the ship for their entire lives. Mostly it’d be about a human drama of extremely driven people who are in a difficult situation, and whose children are forced to carry the torch of their parents.
Oops! Went over by 17 words on the above post. Here’s my slightly revised pitch:
Takes place about a century from now. Humanity has discovered planets around other stars harbor life. We send out a generation ship, where multiple generations of intrepid explorers will be born and die before it reaches its destination. This show follows their journey, where they are faced with mechanical failure, collisions with small dust grains that cause lots of damage, and people who crack under the stress of their situation. Mostly it’d be about a human drama of extremely driven people who are in a difficult situation, and whose children are forced to carry the torch of their parents.
There! 99 words and basically the same content 🙂
The Pasadena Players
A group of former Caltech students form a live theatre company in
Pasadena which is a cover for their real purpose of dealing out justice.
They deal with situations beyond the reach of law and serve the
disenfranchised, by constructing real life dramas (ala Mission
Impossible) that lead bad actors to appropriate outcomes . As former
Caltech students, they employ scientific knowledge and tools in these
dramas. They never use violence as they are funded by a reclusive
billionaire who made his fortune in weapons but is deeply repentant and
believes that violence can never resolve problems.
TV shows have to be spectacular, funny, interesting, certainly not boring. So, my proposal is to have a show in which we test out some of these ideas to see if they really work (and try to explain why it works or doesn’t work).
So I have this idea about this great movie, its about an intelligent guy. One day strange things start to happen. He is approached by these fysicists, and he has to choose between these two pills. He chooses the one that is radiating in the 0.7 micron frequency, and the fysicists tell him the copenhagen interpretation is wrong. They are able to travel to different universes using the many worlds interpretation. He finds out he is “the one”, he can see wave functions and manipulate the collapse of the wave functions (and other cool stuff, because he is “the one”). He and his friends now have to fight “the agents of the many worlds” (who in fact are string fysicists), because the agents want to use dark matter to create a singularity to roll up spacetime.
Sounds cool right?
“Scientists investigating gravitational waves work out a way to use such waves to communicate with the inhabitants of a nearby brane world. To their amazement, they find that the aliens are believers in fundamentalist Christianity. A ruthless theorist from Caltech finds out about this and tries to eliminate the members of the team before they can communicate their findings to Sarah Palin.”
Call it Brains vs Branes. Well, you didn’t say it couldn’t be a horror show.
Three guys share an apartment in Boston: a freelance writer training for an ultramarathon, a chemistry student who wants to work in a Michelin star restaurant, and a disillusioned theoretical physicist in grad school. The runner views himself as a lab rat and writes about his experiments with the latest training gadgets and techniques. The chemist hopes that molecular gastronomy will be his path to a dream job with Heston Blumenthal or Grant Achatz. The theoretician realizes how his math can be applied to topics ranging from tracking flu epidemics to studying the sociology of Facebook.
Eh. I was thinking a grad. student in a fruit fly genetics lab with the usual troubles (inattentive supervisor and general P.I. from Hell, in crisis over career options and general panic about here thesis, etc.), and her hyper-politically active post-doc. boyfriend who works in a Level 3 microbiology lab studying a drug-resistant strain of [i]Y. pestis[/i] on the other side of town. Her boyfriend’s intensity and the politico-freaks he hangs out with have put their relationship in a state of limbo when she gets a distressed encrypted email from him, something about the FBI at his apartment and an outbreak of plague in some major city that’s on CNN in the background. Next thing she knows he’s a “person of interest”, and the only one he can trust is her..Unknown to her, he reveals, he’s gotten in a bit too deep with a modern-day Weather Underground, was looking for a way out, made some really bad decisions, and thinks he’s being scapegoated or framed. He swears he knows nothing about the outbreak, nor why Homeland Security thinks he has anything to do with it. He’s on unpaid leave, under surveillance, and is now as fearful of his erstwhile “friends” as the authorities. But he does know something, something so terrible he won’t even tell her, for fear of the danger she might be under if she knew too. She’s got to use her budding skills as a biologist, learn a whole lot of epidemiology and microbiology along the way, as well as get a crash course in clandestine sleuthing, to find out what the plague really is, where it came from, if her boyfriend is innocent, and if so, why and for who is he taking the fall.
Or something, I dunno. That made my head hurt.
Agh, totally missed the 100 word limit thing…
A black hole is created at the LHC but does not destroy the world…yet! As it turns out, a highly evolved alien civilization from another bubble universe detects the compact energy of newly created black hole and stabilizes it so that they can send messages through and eventually create a portal between universes. Very quickly they advance our knowledge of the sciences beyond the wildest imaginations of any physicists (turns out string theory was at least partially correct). Unfortunately for humans another advanced civilization has detected the black hole as well but they have much more sinister intentions…
I totally ripped off John Cramer’s book Einstein’s Bridge. Someone should just make that into a TV show but remove all the crap about “reading” and “writing” genetic code. He should have just stuck to physics.
A physics book from the future falls into the home of young Ensten. She, with the help of her friends, begins to translate the text and create some marvelous devices. These devices assist the team in solving crime, etc mysteries. Super magnifying telescopes and microscopes, powerful particle weapons, super-conducting this and that, even a spot of biology. The local mechanics professor, small-minded Xyzzyst continually tries to steal the book but is ever-thwarted in his clumsy attempts. The dog is called Pharoah.
An enormous laser experiment blows a hole in local space-time. Things start to behave strangely, and hilariously, the world over. Young Ruford with the assistance of a mysterious mechanics professor has to adjust the parameters of reality back to normal. Different parameter each week. E.g. speed of sound drops to 1 meter a minute. Something electromagnetical causes clothes to start becoming transparent. Gravity becomes stronger…the world starts spinning faster…the moon draws closer…air becomes thicker…ice sinks. The dog’s called Rhombus.
Set before the Big Bang, everyone crammed into singularity, and thus interact outside our natural laws. For TV: it’s ridiculous and fantastic. For science: light is more prominent on a dark screen. The dog’s name is Cynthia Verity.
Movie Title: Commutator Zero
Movie Description: An alien, Z, who takes the form of a man, comes to earth from a far away galaxy. Actually, he comes from so far away that the physical laws in his home universe are much different from our own. One of the more interesting laws in his homeland is the “commutator zero” law, which is the name given for the fact that it does not matter what order you do things. Ever. For example, you would probably agree that the order of the following tasks is important for the ultimate outcome:
1. Fill a pot with water
2. Boil water
3. Put hand in water
4. Take hand out of water
Now do this:
1. Fill a pot with water
2. Put hand in water
3. Take hand out of water
4. Boil water
Very different outcomes due to a modest reordering of tasks, yes? But in Zuzuu (Z’s home planet, and universe, where also z and u are the only letters they have, so they have to use the same name for planet and universe, due of course to the very limited number of words they can actually create) the order does not matter! Wrap your head around that. Of course you can’t, it’s like trying to imagine a fourth spatial dimension, a new color, or a Brit with good teeth! (To the British readers: That was certainly a low blow, and very unoriginal. Here’s the problem though. My backspace key is quite honestly broken, so both you and I are stuck with that joke. Sorry.)
Ok, so I hope you’re following. Now, Z comes to earth, and since he is used to the order of tasks never being an issue, hilarious occurrences, well, they occur. The first hilarious occurence will probably be the hand in the boiling water bit. I’m not sure how to motivate that scene, but it will come. Another hilarious occurrence could be when Z goes to the bathroom! Yes, you’ve probably already thought of this. Recommended order: Go to the bathroom, then clean yourself up. What Z does is this: Cleans himself up, then goes to the bathroom! Leaving himself unclean! Gross!
So, after a good two hours of exploring Z and his interesting dilemma, the movie will “end” and the audience will be asked to leave. Once the patrons have left the theatre, the real ending will be shown to an empty theatre. This seemingly absurd conclusion of course is one final illustration, that indeed, on planet earth, the order of doing things is very important! This is art baby.
@ astromcnaught:
Something electromagnetical causes clothes to start becoming transparent
What a useful idea 😉