If you spend a lot of time in the MGM Grand in Vegas (and who doesn’t?), you will have walked by Television City. It’s a fun place to get some free entertainment if the craps tables have been unkind (or if you had a great meal at Joel Robuchon), but it’s serious business for CBS/Viacom: this is where they show clips and pilots of prospective shows to average Americans, to gauge whether they should be picked up for seasons to come. Apparently it’s easier to find average Americans in Vegas than over here in LA.
So here’s your chance to chime in on our contest to choose a science-themed TV show. Recall that the idea behind the elevator pitch contest was that you had bumped into CBS bigwig Les Moonves, and taken the opportunity to quickly pitch a TV idea that made use of science in some way. While you might have thought that Mr. Moonves was just humoring you, in fact he took some of the ideas very seriously, and ultimately picked six of them to make pilots of each. Sadly, we don’t have clips from the actual pilots; something about intellectual property rights. But here are the original descriptions of the six finalists; note that CBS has tentatively assigned names to each show.
Below the fold there is a poll, where you can vote on which show you like the best! Voting will be open for the next week. For the winner, a T-shirt, and who knows? Some people in high places read this blog.
- New Horizons (Jason Dick)
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.
- Three Geeks in Boston (Naveen)
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.
- The Parameters (astromcnaught)
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.
- The Scientific Inquisitor (Matt)
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.
- Friends with Experiments (Peggy)
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.
- Apocalypse Tomorrow (Dr. Free-Ride)
The economy has tanked and modern infrastructure (utilities, highways, food supplies, schools) is decaying – “pre-apocalypse”. We focus on a couple who left science a decade ago, moving to a small town for a new start. Their kids keep stumbling into sciencey situations, drawing their parents into them. Their town has a distinct anti-science vibe — science and technology didn’t hold off the decay gripping the community, and (we find out) the town is still scarred by tragic events due to mad scientists. Despite themselves, our family uses scientific reasoning and keen observation to rebuild the community and their own lives.
Click to get to the poll and cast your vote…
Note the real lesson here: it’s not easy to come up with a show idea that’s interesting, dramatic, and can be pitched in 100 words or less! (HP’s The Uncertainty Principle had promise, but Mr. Moonves was not convinced that a season-long struggle for funding would maintain interest.) I was happy that we came up with so many good choices.
I really like The Scientific Inquisitor, and think it could be built to amazing levels of popular hype if it was presented with appropriately dramatic music as an earnest search for miracles, as seen on every random religious channel I surf past. The only difference (cleverly never revealed until the last minute) is that each one of the miracles always has a earth-shatteringly mundane natural explanation when examined scientifically.
Possible spinoffs: similar shows about psychics, and magic herbal medical potions.
My worries about New Horizons were connected to the idea that the ship and crew are smallish. Someone at the forum for Dresden Codak pointed out that I made that assumption without reason.
Then he mentioned some neat space habitats: The Bernal Sphere, The Stanford Torus, and The O’Neill Cylinder.
Space Engineering question for the CV readers: How big an effect would the shape of a large ship have on its speed and stability? There’s cosmic dust to deal with in the least.
Sean: ‘Did you seriously just slam the existing suggestions after not bothering to create an entry yourself? Pretty weak.”
Oh, I apologize, actually. It was early in the morning and I was not aware this was an open contest; only that I was allowed to vote! Hang on, I’ll come up with something, even if I steal it from a more famous author…
Did I read Sean’s former post on The Elevator Pitch idea with great any great depth? Nope. Ddi I also read it slowly? Nope. Did I only read the first sentence, one middle sentence, then the last sentence just to get a jist? Yep. Should other people do this? Nope. Was it because I was in a hurry? Yep. Is this comment starting to resemble a flow chart? Yep…if no then go to…
Actually it is pretty easy to come up with a hundred word elevator pitch, hence the reason why they exist as elevator pitches; a quick way to hear a bunch of ideas. The problem is that these all suck and problem belong on the Disney channel with Phil of the Future. The Scientific Inquisitor sounds like Contact, except without a character one can identify with. A cardinal?
I did like the pitch for “Darkest Dreams”
Civil war looms in a solar system containing 7 habitable planets. Four estranged siblings: two brothers and two sisters, live on separate planets. As problems escalate, they struggle with the vagaries of their personal lives and their own physical and emotional disparities from one another, within the context of a looming civil war. In a drama spanning the vast solar system, they learn that life is not so simple as they are forced to make choices that affect themselves, each other and the whole solar system.
New Horizons: immediately got my attention. But to make it an enjoyable show, the ship must be allowed to stop, so they could gather technology from the said alien vessel and it should be a bit more “fi” and less “sci”.
Three geeks in Boston: It’s too hard to find the balance between SF and sitcom IMO
The parameters: this is the direction Eureka should be heading. The premise is a lot more “fi” than “sci”, so would be the solutions, but the accurate physical description of the changes would be funny. Sonic booms caused by people talking and walking in the same time… clothes getting to be transparent… I’d love it. 🙂
The scientific inquisitor: either miniseries, or something should cause more and more “wonders” to happen.
FWE: See above (Three geeks in Boston)
Apocalypse Tomorrow: can be interesting, if the town would be very very mysterious. Also, devices left in the town by the mad scientist should turn on causing problems to solve.
I voted for New Horizons, but all of them sounds interesting, if they could find the balance between science, fiction and comedy.
I like the Friends with experiments idea, I can imagine it more in a Scrubs style though.
Shame I didn’t see the original competition, I’ve been thinking about how great the TV series House would be if, instead of a famous doctor and his three attending solving problems each episode, House could be a famous physicist and his three grad students solving problems ranging from problematic experimental setups to theoretical problems. There’s limitless potential for plots and relationships with other professors, students, funding agencies, head of department, teaching duties etc.. in House’s inimitable style. Though he’d be more of a Feynman type in my show..
Even if they don’t understand the physics talk people like to see things being solved cleverly, no one really cares what medical talk House is spouting, they just know it’s correct and fixes the issue. And it’d be great to turn the public’s perception of science as dry and boring into something like House/Scrubs.
Sorry this comment turned more into a late entry! Sean feel free to delete if it doesn’t belong here..
@ Matt
My apologies. LOL I didn’t mean to disparage your suggestion by comparing it to a Dan Brown novel. I think it has the chance of being the most successful show, due to the popularity of similar-themed shows such as “The Night Stalker”, “X-Files”, and “Fringe” (the latter of which, almost has as much science as ‘Futurama’)
I guess I’m leary of giving biochem lab life the House or ER treatment, because, just as emergency rooms are not churning cauldrons of near-constant drama and hot sex, the day-to-day life of your average bio-researcher is (if he/she is lucky) generally a pretty low-key affair. I mean, do you guys want realism or not? If so, just be prepared. When there has been “drama” that I’ve witnessed, it’s usually of the sort that gives “science” a bad name, e.g. tyrannical senior investigators reducing underachieving grad students and post-docs to tears and chronic anxiety attacks, or petty arguments erupting between normally repressed and painfully awkward individuals, sort of the emotional equivalent of dropping a can of Coke down the stairs and cracking it open. You have bursts of joyful excitement when things go very well, but, experimental science being what it is, that’s not terribly often. Everything else is a lot of very meticulous, laborious, often tedious work, punctuated with friendly banter and gossip of the sort you’d expect in any workplace. To make lab life recognizable, yet interesting on the level of entertainment, I fear you’d wind up with something akin to what “The Office” or “Dilbert” does for corporate life. It’d be a legitimate perspective, but if people want to produce something that’s not only edutainment but also some sort of pro-science propaganda, you might not want the primary focus to be life at the bench.
Good job PZ didn’t enter, what with his poll-busting skills and all that.
“In first place, with 147,346 votes – PZ Myers with The Octo-twins, in second place with 135 votes…”
I thought the simple tactic of entering as many times as I could would stack the odds, but rather belatedly now realise that 100 ideas just don’t add up to one good idea. On the other hand, you never know until aferwards, and 100 bad ideas is still probably better than no idea!
I vote for t-shirts for the top 3 🙂
How about “24 Experiments” where Kiefer Sutherland stars as a science professor (general title), the show takes place in real-time, and he and his students/colleagues have to run around mixing chemicals, reading books and calculating things to make groundbreaking discoveries before other scientists do? They can also consistently break the school “rules” to make them more rebellious. And for good measure, there can be comic relief in the character of “Pythagoras”, a grad student who sells things like safety goggles and bunsen burners for real cheap on the black science market?
(That last comment wasn’t left by me! Not that I disagree with the joke, but that was almost certainly Marc Humpert causing trouble.)
@ Matt
Ok, I DID mean to disparage your suggestion by comparing it to a Dan Brown novel, but it was a total joke because I’ve never actually read “Angels and Demons”. So don’t be offended! I really think a lot of these ideas are great though, and I’m glad you all took the time to write them.
@ Nick Ernst
If they used any of those structures (they’re all so similar so it doesn’t matter which), I was thinking the story could even be slightly different, like these people are testing these new facilities in space and maybe something goes wrong. You really got me thinking though!
And whether you posted that “24” story or not, I thought it was hilarious, LOL!
What about some adaptation of The Culture of Ian Banks? E.g. i’m sure that the novel “State of the Art”, where Culture Ship visits the Earth and crew members spend some time on the planet (and are generally appaled by our wicked ways), can be a base of a good TV serial.
Several Culture citizens – kind of human-like people with lots of extra glands and abilities that come from millenia of genetic tinkering – spend time on Earth living among us. Also, they regularly return to the Ship to take a rest, discuss things etc. Worth to note that Culture Ships are extremely powerful AIs and have rich personalities, usually viewing the Universe with sarcastic wit. Also they usually have funny names like “Oops i did it again”, “Don’t bother” or “I told you i’m a bad guy!” (warship).
Crew members have very different temperament, ideas about whether to involve Earth into some improvement program, level of antypathy towards humans etc. In the end the Ships is leaving solar system. One of the crew abandons his extra abilities and stays on Earth, the other is dead. The Ship decides to let Humanity evolve by itself.
@ Loki
I just thought, wouldn’t it be funny if the theme song in the former ship was a special version of Britney Spears’ hit song “Oops I Did It Again”? That would add some sex-appeal to the show too!
Max Raabe version? 🙂
LOL, you DIDN’T!!!
Hey,
Who ever wins this, well good for them. Lets hope it’s a hit!
I dunno, maybe astromcnaught’s idea is ok? Just… who ever, then that’s great news. I am just really no good at stories, especially SF or fantasy etc. Will keep an eye on the show!
Claire
I wonder if the creator of “The Scientific Inquisitor” knows what a Devil’s Advocate (advocatus diaboli) is ? Every canonization proceeding for centuries had one, until John Paul the Second decided the Church needed lots of new saints, and no inconvenient roadblocks.
I voted for Parameters, picturing the mechanics professor as a zany, Doctor Who-type character. Think of all the ridiculous scenarios the characters could get themselves into. =)
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