TV Show of the Week
Back in 1996, today's "digital revolution" was still in its infancy. Most people had e-mail at work but not at home, and blogs were unheard of. You had to be a really hardcore Web person/techie to have a personal site, and many companies didn't even have Web sites yet. I, however, always being one to fancy myself just a little ahead of the curve, was online at home. I was writing reviews of Web sites for an online guide and a now-defunct print mag called, "The Net." So I did have e-mail at home, and since I was freelancing, also had a lot of time on my hands. Hmmm, e-mail and idle hands, what kind of mayhem could I create in that proverbial Devil's workshop?
Said mayhem turned out to be a weekly e-mail called "TV Show of the Week" that I sent to a devoted (read: I had their e-mail addresses) group of fans. These were fictional shows and made-for-TV movies that I made up weekly, generally parodies of existing TV shows or movies. Some of them weren't great, but others were really pretty funny. I stopped when I ran out of ideas or when I started full time at Hodes; don't really remember which it was. So these are all from either 1996 or 1997. I actually used a few of them as writing examples when I first interviewed for the Online Editor job at Hodes. (Of course, Noel was crazy, which is why I could do that.)
I'm only putting the best of the bunch here. Rather than try to categorize them--fairly impossible since they were all basically comedies--I'm going to list them by titles, in the order I did them rather than alphabetically. Some of them were a series and played off each other, and you won't know which was first unless I list them in chronological order (across, then down). So if you want to skip around, feel free, but know that you may be missing the entry that will make the one you're reading seem funnier. (Or have it make sense at all.) Here's the original e-mail text that went out with the shows.
My personal favorite? Hard to narrow it down, but I'd have to say anything with a theme song or song titles; probably "Mr. Ned," "Mean Acres," and the assorted "Titanic" spinoffs. And, of course, the many guest-star appearances by former U.S. Senator Bob Dole. I actually had a whole section of titles that I never wrote the shows for, and I have those listed down at the end. I may flesh them out eventually. It's obviously easier to come up with a title than it is to create the actual show outline. But you could pretty much turn on your TV to some of the new sitcoms to know that's true.
The Shows
Just Titles
Saint Sebastian and Arrow |
The Ratman of Attica |
Hindenberg--The Musical |
Lost in White Space |
Helga's Bavarian Squash Bake |
(And Then There's) Claude |
The Untouchables (set in India) |
Guitar Girls |
The Little Richard Show |
The Cheese King |
The House of the Seven Clark Gables (Reality) |
Fiddler on the Titanic |