h a l f b a k e r yCompound disinterest.
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Must-See TV
Keep your viewership by weaving a semi-continuous plot through several shows for an evening. | |
Tonight on œTV:
At 7:00: On 'Murder, She Wrote', before discovery, the murder suspect is incapacitated in a hit-and-run accident. The case dies unresolved.
8:00: On that 70's show: Eric, upon driving his pregnant girlfriend to the hospital, flees the scene of a hit-and-run accident. After
being found out, he stews over whether or not to visit his injured victim.
At 8:30: on ER: an unconscious hit-and-run victim with a sordid story and dark past is admitted into the hospital. After confessing his story to a comatose priest, he dies.
At 9:30: on CSI Miami: the team investigates a deadly hit-and-run accident. But is the victim a murderer?
Here's one exaple, usually they don't have as many shows as you suggest.
http://www.poobala.com/vivavegas.html
"... these crossovers all occurred as part of ABC's Viva Las Vegas night..." [swamilad, Nov 05 2004]
Tangents
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Tangents
by benfrost. [calum, Nov 05 2004]
[link]
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Presumably the CSI episode would have
a secondary plotline about the famous
novelist who'd been investigating the
accident victim: Why do people keep
dying around J.B. Fletcher? |
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[trout] she's obviously amazingly adept at framing people |
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I've thought about this too. On 'Casualty' (UK version of ER), there are often police officers and fire crews, and on 'The Bill' (police), there are sometimes hospital scenes, and i think there could be three linked series working together. 'Casualty' already has a spin-off general hospital series. It might also make sense from a ratings point of view because popular series could support less-popular ones, but it might also work the other way, i.e. bring down the ratings down. It would be more feasible in Britain because locations are closer together and there wouldn't need to be an excuse for someone in NYC to go to LA or whatever.
However, having had this thought, i decided i was watching too much TV. |
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Great idea [Ray]. TV would be like Kevin Smith films! [+] |
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Hate to sound like a geek here but they often do this with big storylines in DC Comics, spreading over several lines. Ref: Our Worlds At War. |
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Why would ER and CSI be dealing with a case that transpired in the seventies? And why do all our emergency services programmes consist of acronyms these days? |
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I always thought she was framing them too [scubadooper]. I think she used hypnosis for the confessions. |
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Oh yeah, I like this idea. |
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It's a very interesting idea... but what happens when the season goes into reruns? Or when old episodes of one or more of the shows goes into syndication? |
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The Munch character from 'Homocide:Life on the Street' has appeared in an episode of @The X-Files' and then went on to 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit'. This would be a great extension of this but I'm not sure I'd want them all in the same evening. There should be a limit on the number of programmes with colons in the titles in any one season too. |
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'A hit and run accident has happened' |
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'Theres a car on the pitch .. it's hit one of the players' |
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'Icy roads, be careful not to hit anyone |
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12 midnight its the late night horror |
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'Oh my god - that dead guy came back to life as a zombie'. |
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This sounds better than the Musty TV
they are playing. |
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It would be an interesting challenge to incorporate something set in a different period, like 'That 70s Show'. It could be done as a flashback, as a cold case for a police series, or in a SF-type programme as a time travel scenario, which would probably be the lamest solution. |
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I just picked a goofy TV comedy out of a hat, really. I wanted to try to work in The Simpsons, but thought that the leap into cartoons would be simply too much genre-bending to make sense. |
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Each show would be written so as to have some kind of resolution on its own particular plotline, so they could be separated if need be. |
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I'm aware of character-swapping, like Friends and Sienfeld, for example, but have never seen shows pick up where the last one left off in a different genre. |
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'The Simpsons' also occurred to me, and of course it did do one crossover. There was an episode of 'Malcolm in the Middle' which had a character similar to George in Seinfeld, also played by Jason Alexander, but he didn't seem to be the same character. I think it might be good to stretch the crossover to make things more difficult to link. A different time period would be one way to do this. It could even be used to grab the audience, by starting off at a point where there would appear to be no possible link and gradually working towards one. |
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Scheduling would be a nightmare as
you'd have to screen episodes of
different series in sync and in a certain
order. Particularly as some episodes
would contain spoilers for other series.
+, though as I like the concept. |
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To avoid me getting bored with the total lack of stylistic difference in mainstream US drama, perhaps the idea could be implemented in a one off telethon affair, with emergency services drama, sitcom, fake news etc all coupled together, to create a woozy stylistic mishmash. |
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'Cross-over' episodes happen all the time. NBC is doing it with "Las Vegas" and "Crossing Jordan" just this week. |
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Mind you, the shows are not aired on the same night, but that's not a bad thing as far as the nets are concerned. |
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