Entertainment Now!

A new years special of Entertainment Now, a popular state-sponsored entertainment talk show presents 5 segments and interviews advertising new TV shows. The first is Finds, a bizzare reproduction of a nineties style sitcom in which characters repeat catchphrases and speak in an extremely broken fashion shoehorning in references to random nineties products and media. The second is Graves, a hyperviolent detective show that wallows in its' own edginess to a comedic degree. The third is Uptown Valley, a drama series about an upperclass family whos' every move casually hurts thousands of people. The fourth and final short is a clip from In Your Home, a clip show reminiscent of you've been framed but taken entirely without the consent and knowlege of the people featured, with footage lifted from surveillance cameras and the cameras built into consumer electronics. Each piece is introduced with an interview, the first being with Finnian Cole, an archeologist turned producer who found old scripts in the remains of what once was Hollywood, LA. The second interview is with an actor who loves the smell of his own farts called Flurbbert MacHurbbert, who is obsessed with his method. This interview is the longest and is used to introduce the second and third segments. The third interview is with intelligence analyst turned producer Lavrenty Askimov, a creepy cyborg who is implied to abuse his control over the surveillance system that he can physically plug himself into. The show ends abruptly with Askimov excusing himself after it is implied that he finds compromising images of the presenter. The aesthetic of the short would be as wild as the names of the characters, with an inescapable grime consumed by bright colours and cheap plasticky costumes mimicking high fashion. The Short/show would be split in two halves with advertisements playing in the middle. Me and my friends had a lot of fun coming up with these, and we have several options to try for example- MkFunShakk (a fast food chain that gives out heroin), Cash4Cadavers (a place you can sell your dead loved ones), Westchestermanshire Online University for Men who want to Sound Smart (a seedy university that focusses entirely on surface level knowledge, with courses such as "Mansplaining", "Big Words", and "Condescention 101"), and Bardolatry and you (a cult-like tiered religion that worships Shakespeare as a god). Lydia Snow is the presenter of the show, and she is by far the most normal person in the cast. She is pretty sick with the world around her, but seeing as it's the only world she knows she isn't sure why. She has a crippling addiction to alcohol that is barely hidden. Currently this is formatted as a mixed media stageplay with filmed elements that would be presented on a screen, but I'm fully open to re-editing it into a script for a short, should that be what the buyer wants. I'm fully of the opinion that no creative work is ever finished and will admit that some of the dialogue is awkward at points, but i'm really excited to working it down into a more polished project with someone who was more experience than I do. So long as me and my collaborator are involved in the end project in some form or fashion, I'm over the moon. If this remains as a stageplay, the audience will be in the fiction as the live studio audience for the filming of the show. Costumed security armed with some kind of sci-fi weaponry or simple nightsticks will take tickets at the door, and plants in the audience will be dragged away from the line at least once. Whatever form this project ends up taking will be a lot of fun for the production designers, Blade Runner, Brazil, and Robocop are required watching.