WE DISPERSE, back to our respective Rooms.

 

Looking out the window several days later, we see Tim & Eric drifting by. We watch them pass without anyone going onto the streets to do something to them or see what they’d do to us.

 

When they’re gone, we race out, all the energy we didn’t expend on mobbing them now making us mob ourselves as we pile into a sand pit where we discover two scrolls, perhaps casually discarded by the two of them.

 

Professor Dalton scoops them up, holds them flat against the sun, and declares: “On these scrolls are printed the passwords for the master servers of HBO and Showtime. The age of the Private Series is upon us. No longer will the musings of others be sold to us as our own.”

 

We wait for him to continue. “Let us each write one HBO series and one Showtime series, and meet back here in one week. We will then vote on our collective favorite, which will become our communal fiction for at least the coming season. No longer will premium cable and cable access be worlds apart.”

 

*****

I COME BACK the following week with one HBO series and one Showtime series jotted on notecards, one series per pocket.

 

There are rows of revelation kitsch set up by the sand pit: soapstone statues of Tim & Eric and of Dalton reading the scrolls, and aged-paper versions of the scrolls themselves, some of their letters elided so as to stay on the safe side of blasphemy.

 

We present our ideas. Both of mine are vetoed before I finish saying them.

 

By evening, we’ve narrowed it down to:

 

ALL HIGH SCHOOL BANDS GET HUGE (HBO): A version of Dodge City in which any group of teenagers even remotely resembling a band is immediately launched into Springsteen-levels of fame, even before playing a single show or recording a single track … one practice, or even the rumor of a practice, is enough to make them this generation’s Black Flag. Take any two kids whose parents got them acoustic guitars for their 16th birthdays and put them in a room together … and the Greil Marcus book writes itself. The recurring conflict of the series is the impossibility of making this happen. No one is willing or able to form a high school band, even considering the obscene profit margin. The series follows numerous botched attempts to get two or more high schoolers together for a single jam session in someone’s basement one weekend night when there’s nothing else to do.

 

ALL BODY MOISTURES RUN DRY (SHOWTIME): A version of Dodge City in which all of our bodies have gone dry, because, as the tagline goes, “we over-basted ourselves in our own juices when we were young.” No one is able to have pleasurable sex anymore — only procreative, with awful friction — and no one is able to speak except in a lizardy rasp. Unable to sweat, we faint at least daily. Some clerics claim we are still wet on the inside, deeper in than any mortal implement can reach, but our reality consists of bloating with unreleased energies, our skin always about to burst without bursting … until one member of the community discovers a well in a disused utility shed that contains precisely one drop of moisture for each citizen. In a democratic society, each citizen would choose when and how to use their drop, but in the society of this proposed Showtime series, a small consortium of developers takes it all, ritually fucking and spitting on one another thousands of times, while everyone else further mummifies, in a “reimagining of Chinatown that is barely a reimagining at all.”

 

The team behind UNHOLY FAMILY pitches a spinoff series called INTERMEDIATE GENERATIONS (SHOWTIME): In which “half relatives” are inserted between all members of every family: between siblings, between parents and children, between spouses … making it such that no lines of heredity are direct. Now, all lines are mediated through strangers, to be played by non-actors who have no personality other than that of stand-ins, attenuating the lines of familial connection by their inexplicable presence and refusal to leave, lingering interminably “between every man, woman, and child and their maker.”

 

This show drums up some interest, but the overall sentiment is that UNHOLY FAMILY itself, still running after longer than most lifetimes, scratches enough of its own itch as it is.

 

The show that ends up winning is TAKING THE RAP (HBO): A version of Dodge City in which one guy kills another for no reason. This guy, after sleeping on it, decides he isn’t ready for death row. So he calls his friend and asks if he’ll take the rap for him. The friend says okay. In order to make the transference of guilt realistic, they dig up the body and resurrect it. Then, the original murderer turns his back while his friend kills the resurrected victim, making him the genuine murderer. In the next episode, the same thing happens: the now-guilty friend phones another friend, and they resurrect the body again so that the other friend can kill it and become the guilty one. On and on, each episode featuring many such shuntings, until everyone in town has had a chance to kill the original victim and face death row before calling a friend to get out of it. The theory is that the victim can only be resurrected if it’s going to immediately be killed again, so that there’s no net loss from the world of the dead. The show takes a turn in Episode 11, when it comes to light that the victim has changed over the course of this round robin — from murder to murder, it hasn’t been the same person at all. Perhaps there has never been any resurrection. Perhaps half of Dodge City has killed the other half. Certain humanists despair; certain environmentalists rejoice.

 

We watch this show on HBO every week of the coming year, and I pick up work as an episode recapper, filtering some of my ideas for unmade shows into my reviews of this one, paving the way in the mass consciousness for the next pitching onslaught, when I plan to finally hammer myself home on the anvil of my fellow citizens.