Yesterday I overheard someone talking about how he was taking classes at the University of Maryland because they offer free tuition if you’re over 60.
My brain IMMEDIATELY began scripting a screwball comedy in which a broke millennial who desperately want to finish his long-abandoned degree but is drowning in student debt pretends to be a senior citizen in order to attend college for free.
I’m picturing someone Channing Tatumesque, applying age makeup every morning before he heads off to class. It’s sort of a cross between 21 Jump Street and Mrs. Doubtfire. He keeps forgetting which hip is supposed to be his bad one. His classmates laugh every time he uses slang. There’s definitely a scene where he attends a college party and busts it up on the dance floor.
He catches the eye of a fellow returning student, a woman in her 50s, but she thinks he’s like 70 and she’s already buried one husband, you know? She’s not interested in doing that again. When his charade unravels (hilariously) at the end of the movie, though, she finds out he’s actually like 30 and has abs you could bounce a quarter off. And he’s still super into her. And really, maybe it’s time she gave May-December romance a chance.
Okay so to refine this concept a little:
Our Hero is stuck in a job where he keep seeing people get promoted past him because they have a 4-year degree and he doesn’t. He can’t afford to go back to school until he finishes paying off his student loans for the degree he’s one semester from completing. If he got the promotion he wants he could pay them off a lot quicker. But he can’t get the promotion without the degree.
Along comes a clerical error in his almost-alma mater’s records which lists his birth year as 1948 instead of 1984. He gets a call from them about their “free tuition for seniors” program. “Wow, that sounds amazing!” he says. “I’ll be sure to tell my, uh, grandpa, as soon as he gets home.”
It’s one semester. If he can keep up the charade, he’ll have the degree, get the promotion, pay off the student loans. Hell, if they figure it out after the fact and come after him for the tuition, he’ll be able to afford it by then. He just needs to pass as a 70-year-old until graduation. How hard could it be?
(also, someone in the notes suggested “Senior Year” for a title, which is PERFECT.)
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.
Ohmygod?! I screamed so loud when I saw this and everyone is giving me a questionable look rn. I simply don’t care, take my money I’ll take two of each!! There ALL so adorably glorious!!
I think we should write unnecessary sequels to public-domain classics.
I wanna read Dracula 2: Sherlock Holmes and the Curse of Dracula’s Ghost. I wanna read Pride and Prejudice 2: Elizabeth Has a Gun.
This is literally Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
No, it’s not. P&P&Z is a re-imagining of the original plot, not a sequel. I want to give Elizabeth a gun after the events of the first novel are concluded.
who would Elizabeth have beef enough to kill over with?
Idk, I haven’t actually read P&P since school and I honestly don’t remember it all that well, but that’s the magic of writing unnecessary sequels to public-domain works. It could be whoever we want it to be.
George Wickham.
Lydia comes to Pemberley for a visit, sans her husband because Darcy will not let that man set foot in their house after what he did to Georgiana. And she’s just as bubbly as usual, just as chatty. Until Darcy makes his excuses and leaves the two sisters sitting in front of the fire, and after a slight pause Lydia informs Lizzy that she can’t imagine how she manages to stay happy with a man so serious and grim as Darcy.
Lizzy, who knows her husband well enough by now, and that he was, in fact, smiling for most of dinner, tells her that they are well suited for each other and she is light enough for both of them.
After another pause, Lydia turns dark serious eyes to her eldest sister and asks in a tremulous, “Is he cruel to you too?”
Because we know George Wickham. We know what he is. He’s the man who tried to seduce a fifteen year old girl (Georgiana) for her fortune. He’s the man who ran off with Lydia Bennet, then also fifteen and the youngest of five sisters, knowing her family would be forced to give him her dowry and pay for them to marry her or else she’d be ruined. All the sisters would. And Lizzy knew, she knew the man was a rake and a cad. She’d even seen the way he yanked her arm in the carriage that first time they came home after their elopement. But somehow she’d still hoped that he’d try to make her happy. That hope is dead now.
Though not as dead as Wickham’s about to be.
It would be quite easy, she thinks, to make it look like a hunting accident. But then she wouldn’t get to see the fear in Wickham’s eyes. She wants him to know, you see. She wants to watch the charm and bravado drain from his face as he hears the pistol cock and realizes his final fatal error. Because while it might be a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife, there is yet another greater universal truth he failed to recognize.
Don’t fuck with the Bennet sisters; they will end you.
Pride and Prejudice Two: Elizabeth Has A Gun.
Joy, how does it feel to be the most brilliant creative on this webbed sight
