14 October 2009
Posted in Writers - Jon Sherman
"When you're down & out, there's no meaner place to live than Hollywood" - Dominick Dunne
When new or unusual ideas are presented they can often be met with jaw-dropping disbelief. Today’s pilot is such a case.
What: Settling into his favorite stall in the men’s room and opening the plumbing access panel where he keeps his crossword puzzle book, Avery Pratt jumps five feet off his seat when a squirrel leaps out at him. Not even someone as lacking in ambition and curiosity as Avery could resist crawling through the passage to see where the squirrel could have come from. Moments later Avery finds himself naked, on the ground in the English Countryside, having fallen out of a large hole at the base of a giant oak tree. Taking cover behind the tree when he hears the approach of horses, he witnesses a beautiful woman being pursued by a nobleman and his two lackeys. All four look very familiar to him, except they are outfitted in 16th century regalia.
Who: Pratt soon finds himself recounting his dilemma to two disbelieving traveling thespians – Peter Carbunkle and Claudius Hollyband, the former as dirty and scruffy as the latter is meticulous. Soon they have clothed him and taken him under their wing, primarily for their own theatrical use. Pratt finds himself on his way to Bristol, England via the village of Swansdork (I kid thee not) where Carbunkle and Hollyband try to pass Pratt off to the local innkeeper as the King of Sweden in order to obtain free food, drink, wenches and lodging. It is here that they again encounter the Nobleman, Baron MacBlackman, and his young ward, Olivia, and meet Roger the Foul-Mouthed Fool, a traveling minstrel whose gift for limerick is unsurpassed, at least outside Nantucket (“I wish I were a seaman…Whose ship had hit a rock…For as I drowned, Was sinking down, A mermaid could suck my—“).
Pratt explains that he has seen (as have we) all of these people before under different circumstances – in his 21st century life as a low level sales associate at Amalgamated Adhesives in New Bristol, Connecticut. Manfred MacBlackman, president of Amalgamated Adhesives, has him trapped in a thankless sales position and has also recently thwarted his attempt to invite Olivia, MacBlackman’s assistant, on a date. Disappointed that he was unable to escort Olivia, he instead invited his best friend Roger…to the local Renaissance Faire; Roger, appalled to discover that Avery actually owns his own costume, assured him that he was lucky Olivia was otherwise engaged. It was at the Faire that he first encountered Claudius and Peter, actors performing “the entire works of William Shakespeare…except for the sonnets. With but two persons…in under seven minutes!” Plucking Avery from the audience, Claudius and Peter attempted to make him part of their act. Horrified at the prospect of acting in front of strangers, Avery fled the scene and found himself in the fortune-telling tent of a short, pushy old crone with frizzy hair and an eye patch – uncannily resembling his mother in too many ways. Something in this final encounter is responsible for his foray into not-so-jolly Olde England and the 16th century. Peter and Claudius must help Avery find a way back home without any of them dying at the end of Baron MacBlackman’s sword or at the end of a rope swung by an angry mob.
No Meaner Place: Sherman, whose impressive credits include a long stint on “Frasier,” among many others, knows his way around comedy. Asked by a network development executive to “think outside the box,” he came up with this idea. But let me quote Jon about the results of this pitch session:
“After devising the idea, I returned and pitched it to the executive. He looked at me as though I’d not only thought outside the box, but had jumped up and down on it, set fire to it, peed on it, and thrown it in the river. I had destroyed the box, and he was horrified. This was network television, after all, and so while thinking outside the box was okay, eliminating it entirely was not. Somewhere, there still had to be a box.”
This was not the first time anyone in television suffered from a lack of vision, and certainly won’t be the last.
Formatted as a one hour, it could easily be made into a single camera half hour instead; Sherman’s reluctance to do so stems from the lack of success in half hour comedy for “period” pieces. Although not an expert in production costs, this would certainly be a great deal less expensive than the new network shows that are orchestrated to helicopter crashes and CGI metropolitan demolition.
“The Compleat Pratt” has its roots in “Black Adder,” the British television series, “The Visitors,” the French film (and not the American remake), and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. And lying beneath this 16th Century farce is a hilarious and subversive indictment of corporate structure as a feudal society. Surely someone, somewhere, if not on network (highly unlikely) then on cable, understands this premise, sees the humor and understands how to deconstruct a box. We can only hope. I WANT TO SEE THIS SHOW!
Life Lessons for Writers: Keep thinking outside the box. Ultimately it will keep you sane, although probably not rich.
