Hollywood Pitches: After (TV Series)

The movie and television industry is stagnant. Sure we had some good movies this year, but we also had a lot of the same old crappy movies.  Sure we’ve had some great shows recently but a lot of them are ending soon or have ended already. So we here at Rookerville want to lend a helping hand by giving them some good ideas.  This is “Hollywood Pitches”.

 

After

“After” is a show I thought of not too long ago.  I’ll do my best to explain the idea by first giving you the opening scene (it’s important), quickly explaining the rest of the first episode, and then just telling you the premise and how the show will end. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it.

The very first episode opens with some opera playing.  There’s a man moving furniture around in his house. We get a shot of an open field with a house in a distance.  We see a man come out and go into the cellar.  A zoomed in shot of him pulling the chain to turn on the light.  He quickly grabs something and runs back up.  We still don’t see his face.  Another shot from outside, him running back into the house.  You hear the opera again. He’s dragging a chair across the room.  One more shot from the outside, you see the screen door swinging. Back inside and we finally see the man’s face in a very close closeup, the man is extremely disheveled and worn. We stare at his face for a bit and then a bang and his face drops out of shot really quickly and it’s just a rope swinging. Roll the opening credits.

Okay the stage is set, now for the first episode and then I’ll explain the premise.  The show will open with a flash back of 3 years earlier.  You meet the lead, much less disheveled and rather fresh looking.  He’s at a dinner party with a woman, who you presume he is in a relationship with.  He’s happy, everyone’s happy.  You find out through conversations he’s an acclaimed physicist and this party is actually to celebrate his most recent publication.  At some point he and his girlfriend sneak away from the party to have a little alone time, they’re kissing and having fun, and the man stops and tells the woman to follow him, he wants to show her something.  He leads her outside and begins telling her a little anecdote about their first date, and how it was at a restaurant and if she remembered what happened that night. She did, they witnessed someone getting engaged. He asks her, “do you remember what you said to me after that?”  And before she can even answer he gets down on one knee. She says yes and gives him props for remembering that she said she would hate to get engaged in front of a group of people.  Something about it being a personal, special moment.  The episode goes on at a rather normal pace through the party till everyone’s gone and he and his now fiancé are leaving.  You get the feeling this is the man’s happiest day.  It’s everything he wanted all rolled up into one day.  They get home and they’re stumbling out of the cab, they’re a bit drunk, and stumble up to the door, and right when the door closes behind them we jump to a scene of that same man laying on the ground below the beam he hung himself on.  He’s back to looking disheveled again, so we clearly jumped back to the present, and he’s looking up at the beam that he just hung himself on, and there’s no rope.  Everything is in its rightful place.  He’s still laying on his back.  He has a baffled look on his face.  Episode ends.

Okay time for the premise.  The whole show will be going back and forth between everything leading up to the suicide and everything afterwards.  The whole time in present time, he’s trying to figure out if he’s actually alive or if this is all some figment of his dying imagination.  It just doesn’t make sense.  What you find out when watching the past is that his fiancé prior to their wedding gets diagnosed with cancer and dies.  Doctor tells him, they wish they caught it sooner, they probably could’ve saved her.  He eventually becomes obsessed with creating a means to travel back in time to save his wife.  Its what his published paper was on.  A theory on time travel. But all that is a slow burn of development.  The idea that he’s even working on time machine wouldn’t be known till a few seasons later.  The show will spend a season or two just leading up to the fact that his fiancé eventually gets cancer and dies.  That will be a big reveal.  It will explain his present state.  The shows ending will reveal that he “survived” the suicide attempt cause his time machine actually worked.  It actually shot him ahead 2 days when he used it for the first time to test it the morning before trying to commit suicide.  In some really complex scientific way they’ll explain that for those few hours from when he used the time machine and when he attempted the suicide, he was actually existing on two different timelines at once.  Which will make sense when you see the shows very first scene again and you realize he’s kind of losing it, as he’s hearing things.  Show ends with him realizing this and finally going to use the time machine again, this time setting it for the past to save his wife, and again, he hangs “himself”, or the self that was left behind. Boom series finale of the show “After”.

There you go AMC or whoever needs a TV show.  And there’s plenty more where that came from. This has been “Hollywood Pitches”.

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