TV 2.0 Pitch

It seems easy to see where televised entertainment is going. With more and more pop-up ads on the screen, product placement, competition with dorm room videos, and the tsunami rise in popularity of online, interactive entertainment. I just want someone to make the leap sooner than later.

And of course I'd love to get a check out of it.

So here's my pitch.

You've got a TV show. You've got actors and writers and sets and all the things that make look just like something else that's successful.

Now let's make it different.

Your scene is moving along. The drawn-out romance between buff-doctor A and hot-soccer-mom B steams the screen. What line will fall from Doctor A's ruggedly sculpted lips?

Let's poll the real-time survey running in the lower right hand corner and see what the audience is frantically typing away while Hot-soccer mom's blonde hair ripples across her shoulders, neck arching, cheeks flushing --

HEY! t00b_b0t378's suggestion is flagged -- it flashes bright crimson on the scrolling window -- on the live set it appears in the teleprompter and Doctor A utters the words his long sought love has longed to hear!

"Damn, I wish I were a man."

Well, maybe not, but now the actors spin into a frenzy of improv for the next 45 seconds, before the pre-recorded segment saves them from the bedlam t00b_b0t378 and random timing caused.

But it doesn't stop at randomly selected dialog posts. The show polls for which "prop" to be used in the next live scene - will it be a can of Red Bull, the spiffy new phone from Verizon wireless, or a Hot Pocket? Who knows? Who cares? The audience cares because the ticker across the bottom of the screen and on the website are telling us the next live scene is a police prisoner interrogation, or in a confessional, or a steamy romance scene.

The audience's power extends past dialog twists though. The show polls for which character dies in the plane crash, or left the positive pregnancy test on the bathroom sink, or knows the truth about buff Doctor A's plumbing. The audience interacts with the story, drives it, tweaks it, directs it.

Sure, there are writers. There has to be continuity, and you can't do the whole show live.

Sure, there are commercials. But there's also product placement that not only advertises the product, and two or three others, at the same time, but also forces the audience to ponder each product before voting to have Soccer-Mom B pull it out of her pilates bag.

But then there's the audience, sitting on the other side of that forth wall, and shouting suggestions through it.

The only question is - what kind of show can make this leap?

You can't make it strictly a comedy -- too hard to make it funny all the time.
You can't make it strictly a drama -- too hard to keep the continuity.

But there is a perfect genre for this, where any twist of plot can be untwisted. Where any apparently odd slip of the tongue can be explained away in next week's episode. Where dramatic pauses are normal, and can cover for that actor checking the teleprompter and deciphering the line "ur 2 hot!" before he speaks...


Prime Time Mexican Soap Opera.

That's what I want to see. Beautiful people of all ages having their strings pulled by millions of viewing puppeteers, and having the mayhem of this week's episode be sorted out next week, or compounded with interest.

Bring it on!