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. Itās 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. Theyāre young, theyāre 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 thereās 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.
Since I was at exactly 100 words above, I did not include the dog. But as a brief addendum. The dog is a coonhound named “Feynmann”.
e.
How about a super documentary where a brussels sprout* is subjected to extremes of nature…Flattened by gravity, shoved into a vacuum, heated to 2×10**20 degrees, frozen to absolute zero, suspended inside the worlds largest Van de Graf generator, LHC’d into pions, etc?
*Could maybe use cauliflower, dunno, it’s hard to chose.
Mild mannered science teacher/blogger is fundamentalist, creationist, antivaccine, etc. Encourages others to be same. Except he’s not an earthling at all. He is actually an alian sent from Planet TMTS. TMTS is an advanced civilization with the ability to see into the future and they have realized that if Planet Earth continues on its scientific course, it will be a rival to TMTS within 500 years. The teacher has been sent to Earth to encourage earthlings to follow fundamentalist religions and junk science theories as a way to derail scientific progress on Earth, thus eliminating a future rival. Each week another nefarious plot of his is disrupted by real scientists doing real science. And his hot wife looks just like sarah palin.
The pre-pitch (to sell you guys on what I’m about to pitch, not Les yet):
If science is to be an integral part of the show, almost a character in its own right, it needs to be in fundamental conflict with something. Otherwise it becomes little more than set dressing. To keep it front and center in the structure of the show, I propose that the primary source of tension should be the struggle between scientific thinking, and non-scientific thinking. As often as not, this battle is waged within the mind of the main character.
Now, the Moonves pitch:
A lapsed cardinal with a rigorous scientific background is called back into service by the Pope. When the vatican is under pressure to bestow sainthood on a politically inconvenient deceased priest, they dispatch the show’s hero. Our cardinal has secret instructions to debunk the would-be saint’s requisite “miracles”, thereby denying sainthood. He does so with scientific acumen and great aplomb. Each week, he struggles with being used by an organization he doesn’t respect, as well as his own emotional desire to believe in something beyond the cold materialism he practices. Both cynical and hopeful, the show illuminates the boundary between evidence and faith, in a (perhaps Sisyphean) struggle to find a balance between the two.
Would love to see a series based on the events of “Far-Seer” by Robert Sawyer. I know this isn’t a pitch for my own idea, but how can you beat this?
“Imagine a distant world that parallels the technology and ideology of Galileo’s time. Our hero sets off on pilgrimage armed with the newly invented telescope, and not only discovers that their world is not the center of the universe, but that their world is like a moon going around Jupiter. Furthermore, he discovers that his homeworld is orbiting dangerously close to the Jupiter-like planet, and the whole world is in danger of being torn apart in a few generations as the orbit continues to decay. Ultimately, the heroes have to fight against church and state to change their society’s world views and to try to push their civilization to the space age before it’s too late.”
Furthermore, in the book all the fauna on the planet has decended from dinosaurs that were transplanted by aliens millions of years previously – don’t know if the dinosaur part would sell to Moonves as well as it would to me… š
A whacky group from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Atoms) go from particle accellerator to particle accellator to stop the smashing of innocent atoms. In the process of rescuing atoms, “missing energy” is reported for collisions (which never really happened), leading to hilarious consequences for physicists, who think they have discovered black holes, extra dimensions, and dark matter/energy. The heroes have a dog named “Scraps.”
Whump.
“Oh no, it’s you again”
“Look Mr. Moonves, this one’s really great.”
“Will you stop bugging me, your ideas are lousy, you have no commercial sense whatever. And you smell real bad.”
“No, I mean yes, but you’ll love this one. Really.”
Moonves sticks his fingers in his ears and starts humming.
“This monolith appears on the moon…”
“What?”
“Er, We shrink folk and inject them into…”
“Look, I’m about to call security”
“Ok, Ok, Here we go. This kid gets shorted into a robot, vectored into a calculating machine.”
“I’ll vector you!”
“Yeah, wait, all the kid sees is math, equations of state, he’s stuck in the machine. No one believes his cries for help.”
“I’m gonna cry.”
“You must see, a thinking being in an algorithm, eh? Stuck fast to persuade with nothing but words.”
Ping!
“My floor.”
“Is that that you, Mr. Moonves? Is that you in the machine too?”
My pitch is posted at my blog.
I would say they should just revive MacGyver : the Caltech Days.
I nominate “The dog is named …” as the latest internet meme. Append after any slightly hair-brained scheme you’re suggesting.
“…and then if the molecule radiatively de-excites before the next cosmic ray collision, then you can reproduce the bump in the spectrum. And the dog is named Scraps.”
“Hooray! Of course, there’s no saying who has hair…” said Rufus.
I haven’t seen Eleventh Hour, so I can’t comment from personal experience, but from what I’ve read about the show I’m surprised they are being criticized for being too scientifically accurate, as opposed to too gory or too or too over-the-top.
Here’s my pitch: Friends in a top university molecular biology lab. Three young men and three young women – a couple of postdocs, grad students, a Sigma sales rep and a departmental administrator – find love and laughs as they run gels, hang out in the departmental lounge, attend conferences, and interact with the other wacky lab denizens. Plenty of opportunity for sight gags, such as an unbalanced ultracentrifuge “walking” through a wall or the noob grad student accidentally setting her bench on fire. And lots of opportunities for romantic situations: all-night sample collecting in the cold room, working closely in the darkroom, or a mixup that puts our male and female postdoc in the same hotel room at the AAAS conference. And what holds them together is their love/hate relationship with their research.
The Uncertainty Principle. A serial drama about particle physicists doing a Big Experiment of some kind [NB: I am not a particle physicist [[and the brackets don’t count toward my word count]]]. Sure, some of them are socially inept geeks with unusual hair choices, but some are “normal” [whatever that is] and some are drop-dead gorgeous Hollywood types.
The season-long story arc involves their efforts to secure funding for the Big Experiment. Along the way, we get to see their passion for the science, as well as their passions for each other. Romances blossom while marriages fail; money and power corrupt friendships. The focus is on the human drama, not neutrinos or the Higgs Boson or whatever. But the background science is top-notch and fully vetted, and the dedication of the scientists to their work is always evident. It’s ER meets Dallas, with nerds.
Season finale: They run the experiment, and the results are … inconclusive. And that sets up season 2.
World wide, there has been a number of mysterious disappearances of scientists and engineers, who according to colleagues, were on the brink of revolutionizing their respective fields. The FBI has two agents, Ted and Alice, assigned to track down who or what is responsible for these disappearances and why. Each episode finds them investigating the disappearance of one specific person, learning about the research of that scientist or engineer and how this may figure in the bigger mystery. Think X-files, but with disappearing geeks instead of UFOs.
Fermi-Walker,
I love this premise. Particularly because I can think of at least 5 or 6 possible parties responsible for the disappearance. This would create all manner of opportunities to keep the plots going. Anyway here’s the list of potential abductors I came up with:
1) The U. S. Government
2) Criminal Syndicate
3) Extraterrestrials
4) A fundamentalist/Luddite religious Sect
5) Nameless Powerful Multinational Corporation
6) International Terrorists
This one could be a lot of fun and the opportunity to teach science is implicit in the plots.
Cheers,
e.
One last attempt for the T shirt…
This time a drama of conflict; intense, intellectual and personal.
Modern science goes mad?
“High energy science had been stuck for decades. Nothing new could be found. Yet the concensus was dreaming towards new dimensions of thought, new universes of reality. Further and further they plunged, excited by their dreams. Yet one or two brave souls could not agree. They thought they could see through the shimmering gleam of the new mathematics. This story is of the battles, the arguments and the entrenched viewpoints coming to boil. Yet always revealing some view of the new nature of reality which appears to be emerging.”
First we need a strong and beautiful female lead (a painkiller Jane). She is infiltrating a secret lab where scientists are doing work that they REALLY want to keep secret. Why? For a number of reasons. 1) Some are discovering that everything is due to chance 2) Some are working on new recreational drugs. 3) The few scientists working on meaningful research are subject to constant backstabbing and sabotage from their evil and lazy colleagues. Whatever it is, its not ready for prime time (but that’s exactly where its going). The dog is grafy.
Lift goes vertically uuupp all floors then the same lift goes horizontally aacrrooss building on the top floor level (visual).
Says to Les Moonves,
“I just wanted to prove to you that Physics is just inverse square laws and things that go at right angles to other things”.
Claire
You know…. i think i would watch any of these shows.
NUMB3Rs was good..for a while. we could definitely use more geeky, action, romance, hilarious, smart, science related programing. The closest thing right now is “Fringe”….the main scientist is quite noble..but also mentally ill. and its more pseudo-science (something the characters have commented on) and total fiction than anything. but its success is heartening, perhaps it will open up the market for this kind of show.
“At some point the public at large has to step up to the plate in terms of scientific and policy literacy, in terms of commitment to education and strong and effective political leadership, and in terms of their own general self-improvement.”
there really hasn’t been anything brilliant on the telly since Arrested Development.
perhaps in addition to the dog, there could be a cat named Schrodinger
Thanks Eliot,
The large number of possible parties responsible for the disappearances means that the plot can have more “red herons” than available from a fishing fleet.
OOps, meant “red herrings”.
Fermi,
Just one more item
you forgot your dog….
š
e
Whatever it is, it should star Kristen Bell and Michael Cera.
Piled Higher and Deeper – a sitcom based on the cartoon by Jorge Cham.
Or, xkcd a bizarre collection of shows based on the extremely funny cartoon by Randall Munroe
Lab B10: Dr. Tangen loses funding for his lab in room B10 of Edwin Hall. Tangen moves to a new university, and only appears occasionally. We follow the āthree tennersā (as they call themselves) as they move on in their lives. Stan, who spent more time home-brewing than studying, opens a microbrewery, and they opt to continue the weekly lab meeting, now on Wednesday night at Stanās āH Bar.ā Jenny changes to a new group, while post-doc Hank gets a job at a local engineering firm. The three share their struggles with new lives, life outside āhard-scienceā, and have fun.