We Need to Write a TV Sitcom Pilot

    I can’t help but think that together we could populate a TV sitcom that would be tons better than anything out there. I’ll give you some basics below and a few characters to get you going, but we need many more personalities to make our sitcom memorable. See what you can add:

    Location: A Workout Gym in a Small Town

    Characters:
    –Steve Lemming: A middle aged guy who mostly stands on the tread mill, drinking something out of a metal cup and gossiping about his years playing football for the Paducah Corn Poners.

    –Thelma Remarkable: A thirty-two year old meter maid just back from the Peace Corp where she worked on Pago Pago, teaching English and perfecting poi recipes for the American palette. She dreams of opening an ethnic fast food restaurant. Her cat, Emeril, has to pull a little kitty respirator around on a tiny trolley since he smoked for so many years.

    –Basil and Thorny: Sixteen-year-old schizophrenic Siamese twins, joined at the torso (two arms, four legs). One of their personalities has a bad crush on Thelma, but they’re not really sure which one.

    –Doc Fornoy: The gym owner and ex-physician (specialty in neurology) who was barred from practicing medicine because he kept trying to bring his patients to a state of perfect happiness with a continually adjusted array of medications.

    We need more characters. Who else hangs out at the gym?
    Ideas for episodes?

    19 Responses

    2. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
      ― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

      “There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”
      ― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

      “So what? All writers are lunatics!”
      ― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

      Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman’s name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer–and if so, why?
      – Bennett Cerf

      (Which brings me to a correction. Bennett Cerf didn’t make the remark about revoking a bad writer’s poetic license. That was Milton Berle._)

      And, finally:

      A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
      – Oscar Wilde

      When I was a reporter for an Anchorage newspaper, I wrote a story about a church group having a “singspiration.” After the linotype operator got through with the story, it was printed as “sinspiration.”

    3. Gullie: I heard this one time,,,
      The binding on your book is superb, the spine exquisite. You should consider doing that to the other three sides.

    4. P, G, & A: Friday morning I “completed” a short piece, less than 1000 words, and sat at my monitor, basking in my own glory. The story had been through 1 rewrite and several edits. I closed the file and left for a weekend trip. When I returned I pulled it up, read it. I punctuated my reading with several, damns, craps, oh sh*ts, etc. So another edit was in order. It is now, gone, submitted, or flushed — I guess depending on my perspective. The creative angst is just a part of the writing process.

      As to mechanical problems, (software), that can be the most maddening of all. I hesitate to say I have so far escaped that suffering. Perhaps a software upgrade or visit to your geek service is in order?

      In the meantime, Gullie, I will place my fingertips on your image on my screen and offer an incantation of ones and zeroes with every hope that my cyber spirit connects with your central processor (some odd Tron flashback I guess) and your problems are cured. But keep a software update option a viable Plan B.

      Birthday wishes to Ann and P’nut.

      jeff

    5. Happy Birthday! I had a very blue night a few days ago, and treated myself to the story too. It does have the quality of making you feel like going forward (Onward!) is the right path. No easy answers; just keeping going. I can relate to that!

      Thanks for the note. It means a lot.

    7. My epiphany for today, the ultimate left brain hit man of writers: After the eighth proof reading of 112 pages, I am ready to hit delete and chuck the hard copy in the trash. I’m sick of it. And I’d planned to inflict this in booklet form on my relatives and friends for Christmas? What was I thinking?!!!

      1. Gullie: if i may paraphrase a line of Morticia Addams in The Addams Family, “Don’t torture yourself my darling. That’s your readers’ job.”

        1. Going to Anchorage this week for cataract surgery and wanted to take in a bunch of the printed booklets to have them bound at Office Max, hence the hurry. I call them booklets, but 112 of pages 8-1/2 by 11″ special double-sided 32 lb. paper makes a substantial “booklet.”

          Word 2010 changes my formatting at will, it seems,which means I have to check each printed book, and it seems every time I read it through, I find something simple I want to change. Actually, I’ve been making these books for a couple years, giving a few to friends. Mostly they are the travels I’ve taken, such as Australia, Antarctica, China/Tibet, Russia, Grand Canyon, Polar Bears (Churchill, Manitoba), and so on. I call them The Aussie Journals, The China Journals, etc. I also did one for Christmas last year which was all full page photos with minimal words. A couple poems illustrated with photos. It was pretty impressive.

          Lots of photos along with the test from my blog. The one I’m working on now is an anthology of short pieces from the past few years, so it was a labor of love until I got sick of reading it.

        2. Thank you Jeff. That’s what I’m afraid of.

          Or, as Bennett Cerf said, “His writing was so bad they revoked his poetic license.”

      2. To quote Peanutberanski: “Back away from the keyboard!” Now take a break for at least four days; a week would be better. This is indeed an ambush, and one that is not meaningful but only grimly inevitable at some point when you write something to share, hoping for share something that means so much to you.

        My mantra at this point is, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” And it really is. This gift is a leap you need to take. Gird the old loins, girl! You can do this.

    8. Ph Jeff, this saga of Phi-Dough (fka Jingles) is fertile ground for being turned inside and out every week in a sit com. Do Maudie and Irene realize that their cat has transformed into a dog? This truly has “build on it” potential.

      1. Tks Peanut – When the dog takes up residence duplicating the life of the cat, his size and doggy personality leaves the two gals confused. It was refreshing to kill someone off but have them come back to life! But I doubt I will make a habit of it. LOL Jeff

    9. Phi-Dough is a Weimaraner who sits partly within, but mostly overflowing, a cat bed on the back porch of Maudie and Irene, two lesbian spinster writers who keep trying to write traditional romance pulp, without success .

      Phi-Dough suffers from a disease known to veterinarian psychiatrists as species disorientation, from an event which cost him the seventh of his nine lives. You see, until 9:53 p.m. yesterday, Phi-Dough was a cat.

      In his previous life, and under his previous name of Jingles, Phi-Dough enjoyed the run of the house during the day, napping on cushy bed pillows when he could get away with it, or sometimes hunkered behind the refrigerator, enjoying the warmth of the compressor motor and the vibrating drone which could lull him to sleep almost instantly.

      At nights Jingles would roam the neighborhood at will, using Mrs. Willoughby’s rose garden as a cat box, and her potted fern plant as his favorite latrine. But last night Mrs. Willoughby was waiting with broom poised, and when Jingles squatted to do his feline “dooty,” she swung the broom with a scream that made Jingles leap over her fence and dash across the road to the safety of his house.

      A moving car changed that plan.

      Unknown to the driver, the car’s left rear wheel connected with Jingles which cost Jingles his seventh of nine lives. As his body tumbled toward the gutter and came to rest, his eighth life took over, but something was lost in the translation. While his spirit remained feline, his corpse began to change. His fluffy fur turned short and red. Short gray legs grew to extreme length. His torso stretched to nearly three feet. And his twitchy tail was now long, pointed and wagging with puppy frenzy.

      Lying confused in his old bed, Phi-Dough instinctively lifts a hind leg vertically in the air to lick himself and tumbles out of his now-tiny bed.

    10. This has possibilities to be a new genre: sci fi/urban fantasy with a touch of decades-late steam punk backed up by a laugh track. May we party on!

    11. Business name : The Paducha Flab to Fab Fitness Center,
      we turn lazy asses turn into buns of steel

      The business is in an 93 year-old, two story, building located in the main business district of Greater Paducha. In the 1920’s the building had a store front that sold sundries and fabrics. There was also a small pharmacy, which was run by Doc Fornoy’s grandfather, the brilliant dwarf , Dr. Esteban Fornoy; the only certified OB,GYN in a Tri- County area. Esteban’s skills came in handy because, behind a secret door at the back of the store, there was a speak easy, illegal gambling tables and a dance hall. On the second floor, above the dance hall was a brothel called, Whores Galore, “where everything had been laid but the carpet.” Dr. Esteban managed to keep the sundries selling, the pills popping, dance music blaring and the working girls free from sexually transmitted diseases, for the most part.

      Young Doc inherited his grandfathers building after the 96 year old dwarf doctor passed away.

      Having completed med school, the younger Doc Fornoy returned to Paducha and decided to transformed his grandfather’s business into a palace for fitness. Little did Young Doc realize that each night, when he turned off the lights and locked the doors at the Flab to Fab. The building would revert back to it’s glory days in the 20’s.

      Each night, ghosts of the customers and call girls from Whores Galore, would come out of the shadows and workout in the gym, they just didn’t do such traditional workouts.

      In the first episode we find Steve Lemming in his usual stance on the treadmill, bragging about the night he made the winning touchdown in the Paducha VS Milver game when the treadmill began to move. Steve was shocked because he had not turned the machine on. The tread began to run faster and faster until it magically propelled Steve back in time and right into the middle of the Speak-Easy and the welcoming arms of Muffy Van-Fluff, Fan Dancer extraordinaire. They strike up a very tactile relationship.