CBS: Medical Drama

[Sylph]

[All My Shadows]

OH MY GOD. LET THE MADNESS END.

[Sylph]

Perhaps this is a good time to ask you about something you've mentioned not so long ago: what kind of show would you like to see? A show about what? It ties into your comment, with which many agreed, that there's a sea of themes and situations left unexplored.

[All My Shadows]

There's all kinds of stuff I'd like to see. Most of it is soapy in nature -- stuff about people, how they get along with each other, their family/romantic/professional relationships, etc.

In many cases, a show could be totally different just by changing its setting. Instead of setting a teen drama in New York or SoCal, set it in rural Minnesota, Montana, Louisiana, Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas, etc. They have teens there, they have dramatic lives, too. Their world probably doesn't include shopping sprees, inheritances, surfing, clubbing, etc, but haven't we seen that already in several different shows? Give me a school-focused teen drama that doesn't rely on cliches, labels, or stereotypes (jocks and geeks and cheerleaders and goths and sluts and popular girls and outcasts and emos blah blah blah). Teenagers have more depth than that, and I wish some writer would rise to the challenge of creating real adolescent characters instead of cartoons. I want a show to do for marching band what FNL does/did for football.

Do a show about people who aren't upper middle class or just stinking rich! Give me my trailer park soap, damn it! Instead of convoluted business storylines and political storylines and all that, show stories that deal with people, their daily lives, their relationships, their friends, their enemies, their conflicts, their highs, their lows. It seems the only way a TV show can show lower-class people is if it's in the context of "redneck comedy" or "hard-hitting urban drama." Not to knock those shows, but there's more to it than that! I hate that every show set in a predominantly black neighborhood has to be a Boyz N the Hood/The Wire clone. There's more to the hood than drugs and violence.

Make the main setting/place of focus something other than a hospital or law office or police department or something. People work at gyms, at restaurants, at daycare centers, as social workers, as truck drivers, as waitresses, as cashiers, as customer service representatives. I understand that you can't base a show entirely on a freaking daycare center, but it doesn't have to be *about* a daycare center. It's about the people who work there, their personal lives, the things they get into. The daycare center or the gym or the Sears or the McDonalds is merely the bond that ties them all together.

You can still be flashy and glamorous, too. Do a show about a music group. Something like a soapy version of Dreamgirls. There's no potential for high drama in that? Or hell, you can do a show about the cast/crew of a Broadway play. The backstage drama is sometimes more interesting than the productions. Or a period piece set in the silent movie era. I don't watch Mad Men, but I appreciate that it's something original (in concept, at least). No Ordinary Family doesn't interest me, but it's different, it's something that at least seems fresh.

There's just too much sameness. Way too much. You can look at schedules from the 70s and 80s, and the lineups were filled with a wide variety of different characters, settings, stories, etc. Today, not so much.