Mockumentary set in medieval England with no explanation as to why or how a camera crew is there
A lot of people have mentioned monty python and the holy grail on this post which is accurate but I was envisioning more of a the office/what we do in the shadows type sitcom complete with talking heads and will-they-or-won’t-theys and with the technology that allows the mockumentary genre to exist going completely unquestioned by the entire cast despise it not occurring anywhere else in the otherwise realistically portrayed setting
…hang on, I think there’s a workable premise here.
The camera crew is a team of time-traveling scientists, studying an isolated village. They don’t bother trying to blend in with the locals much, because they know the village will be wiped out by plague in a few years and no trace of their expedition survives in the historical record. The villagers think they’re wealthy-but-eccentric travelers from a distant land, and they’ve bought off the local lord, a minor knight who doesn’t pay much attention to his serfs anyway.
The scientists are jaded. They’ve all been on multiple expeditions to doomed communities, and they’ve learned not to get too attached to their subjects. Part of the mockumentary format includes their video diaries, internal squabbles, and personality conflicts. The rest is interviews with the locals, footage of the crew tagging along with them in their daily lives, and the various experiments members of the crew are running.
(Most of their research is innocuous: water and soil samples, collecting plant and animal specimens to restore future biodiversity, measuring linguistic drift. All their planned human-subject research had to pass an ethics review board.)
(That said, sometimes opportunities for impromptu data collection arise. And sometimes you get bored and want to know what would happen if you projected a 40-foot holographic cow on the road outside the village.)
(The time travel science ethics review board has very clear rules about starting cults: no matter how funny you think it would be, don’t.)
The tone of the show is pitch-black comedy, at least to start with. The crew is burned out and cynical, the villagers are poor and underfed and overworked. Nobody’s doing their best work, or even trying to, really. This is a team that couldn’t get better, sexier, more exciting assignments, and a village full of people whose idea of a better future is a harvest that fails less than last year’s.
But over the course of, say, three seasons — not quite as long as it’s going to take for the plague to arrive — the research team does something they’re really not supposed to do. They get invested. They start to care, a little. They give the villagers a tiny bit of help, here and there — and they’re shocked to see just how much the villagers manage to do with that help.
But the villagers are still doomed, even if they’re clever and curious and likable. Even if a few of them are smart enough to figure out that the research crew aren’t just weird rich foreigners. Even if letting them all die is starting to feel like a waste, or even a crime.
There’s nothing they can do about it. History is very clear about the village’s fate, and they can’t change history.
Right?
ooh ooh okay. the cold open for every episode (the equivalent to B99’s morning meeting cold opens) is the expedition leader going over a video message from her future self. like just a day or two in the future. usually it’s nothing big, just letting her know about any events in the village that they should try to get recordings of, and warning her about any new bullshit her underlings are going to try to get away with.
in theory she would also get warned away from any actions that could negatively impact the timeline, but this is an extremely low-stakes, low-prestige assignment. everyone with actual career prospects is fighting tooth and nail for the sexy assignments, like pre- volcano Pompeii or Yellowstone. nothing her team can do here really matters, so she never gets warned about anything major.
until sweeps week, probably.
some fun running gags:
the scientists always say decades without specifying the century, leading to constant misunderstandings
“hey it could be worse, we could have been stuck in the 20s”
“what are you talking about? the 1920s are a dream assignment compared to this!”
“oh lol no I meant the 2020s, my bad”
“you know what I miss? live music. when I was stationed in the 90s I got to go to so many concerts”
“no shit? oh man did you get to see Nirvana live, that would rule”
“no but I did see The Magic Flute in Vienna! with Mozart conducting!”
additional running gag: the show starts when the team has already been on site for a while, so most of the villagers are already pretty blasé about seeing future technology. BUT there is one villager who just. always loses her shit, every time. without fail. just full on “BACK, foul creature!!!! WHAT is this FIENDISH SORCERY you wield????” while her neighbors are like “okay calm your tits Maud, they do this every tuesday and it’s fine”
running gag that i am unashamedly stealing from star trek: constant references to events and cultural figures from future history (ie the period between now and when the scientists come from). also it’s never clear, based on the scientists’ offhand references to their childhoods and home lives, whether their future society is a blissful utopia or a very weird dystopia.
running gag with eventual payoff: there are two small and very grubby village children who like to follow the crew around. they never speak. we get lots of reaction shots of the two of them staring blankly at whatever nonsense just happened.
after at least two years of this, a member of the crew is trying to fix a piece of equipment and having no success. the two small children wander into frame (as they often do) and the scientist ignores them (as he usually does)
only this time, the smaller and grubbier child wordlessly pulls a tool out of the scientist’s toolbox and hands it to the larger and slightly less grubby child, who fixes the problem and hands the tool back to the (now dumbfounded) scientist. they walk away, still silent. now it’s the scientist’s turn to stare blankly into the camera.
for maximum comedy the expedition head should be verging on Michael Scott levels of obliviousness. just floating along in a bubble of reassurance from her future self that there’s nothing to worry about.
the cold open is like “good news! the supply drop will go smoothly, no hiccups” and then in the episode we see that their supplies from the future, which were supposed to be teleported to an uninhabited clearing in the woods, landed in the village square in front of the church. on a sunday. and the villagers opened the crates and walked off with a bunch of future tech that the crew now has to hunt down and reclaim.
and they tell their boss none of this, so when she goes to record her message for her past self at the end of the episode she can be like “good news! ” and carry on living her life with the serene confidence of someone who believes in horoscopes and also gets to write her own horoscopes, because her staff makes sure she never knows about their constant fuckups and eleventh-hour saves.
if this is your jam, while you’re waiting for it to get made may I point you in the direction of
This feels like the start to a horror movie and I love it
From his viewpoint– suddenly this woman he’s been sending pictures of his junk goes from “hey, let’s meet up” to “Hello Brian Smith of 1214 Idyllic Terrace. Does your wife Rose know you’re here? How about your mother?”
He panics and blocks her. He’s sponging off of his wife, and if he gets busted, there goes his gravy train.
And then the woman shows up. In his house. She just got a job working with his wife, who absolutely adores her, and brought her home for dinner. And she’s doing that movie maniac thing where the entire conversation is about Brian, but Rose is clueless and whenever Rose isn’t looking she’s got cold eyes on him.
He tries to stay calm, and act like everything’s normal, and he gets up to get a beer or something and when he turns around from the fridge, Patty is standing there.
“Unlock your phone and give it to me right now.”
“I’m not–”
“Right. Now.”
She installs something on it and hands it back.
“I’ll be in touch. Don’t try to change phones.”
He tries to convince his wife not to be friends with her, even tries the “I think she was coming on to me” line, to which the wife is “Oh, that was definitely in your head. Marge is a lesbian.”
And she just gets progressively scarier throughout the film. He gives her a small payoff. She wants more. She leaves a package for Rose on the front door, but conveniently he gets there first and opens it to find printouts of screenshots. More clues get left behind. He’s only able to keep her from finding out through a combination of sheer luck and her gullibility in believing every explanation he comes up with for his odd behavior. Finally he dips into the secret account he’s been using to hide money he’s been stealing from his wife, and it’s a HUGE payout, but she wants MORE.
And then he comes home to find Marge sitting cheerfully next to Rose’s dead body. And Marge is like “Man, the police always start looking at the husband, and they’re going to find a whole bunch of stuff when they look through your texts. You’ve been promising this woman you’re going to leave your wife. You’ve been sending her money. Oh, she’s a catfish from an untraceable IP, and your wife was talking to the bank JUST THIS AFTERNOON about some odd transactions. You panicked and killed her, and you’ve got NO evidence otherwise. I bet you could be on a flight to a non-extradition country before they find the body, though.”
He runs out the door. Marge starts laughing.
Rose joins in.
They kiss.
As the credits roll, you see the events from Rose’s point of view– having drinks with the new girl from work, with whom she’s getting along amazingly, and Marge’s phone goes off. “God, it’s this asshole from Tinder. He keeps sending me dick pics. Sooner or later they’re going to learn. It’s not even a nice dick. LOOK AT THIS. Who finds that attractive???”
“I… used to? Holy fuck, that’s my husband. ”
and the hatching of the plan, to just keep fucking with him, up to “Okay, so, I’m gonna leave it on the doorstep. Make sure you’re a few minutes late, HE has to find it”
“Oh, god, he tried to tell me it was the mailman. At 8:30. It was so pathetic.”
“WHERE DID HE GET TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS FROM? I’m paying off his goddamn college loans!”
Rose reporting to the police that her husband has been embezzling money from her disabled mother’s trust fund.
The police catching him in the airport. He’s smart enough to say nothing without his lawyer present, and by the time he knows what’s going on, he’s realizes exactly how fucked he is.
The trailer is a slowed down horror version of the Piña Colada Song.
5. scifi…. during a peace mission, trade off prince deidara accidentally blows up his entire planet, killing off his species. with no other way to communicate as the only translator was killed off as well, the team seeks sasori, an android with the largest language bank in the universe who now is the only means of communication with the slobbery alien to attain the rich culture and genetic make-up his species has to offer
