You know for all that this blog is a space to put down my own creative work, it’s kind of shocking how ill-equipped it is to talk about things I can’t do. I do board games and card games and talk about RPGs and anime and media and a lot of being angry about fundamentalist christianity, but there are rare times when there’s other stuff that interests me as well. Remember that one time I presented some recipes? What about the occasional outbursts of flag threads?
Here’s something I don’t think I’d ever have the means to make, then: I’ve been thinking about web shows.
I mean specifically web shows in the mould of a short-form TV-imitative docudrama in the vein of The Office, and Arrested Development, maybe Parks and Recreation. I don’t know those shows very well, but I am familiar with the sort of short clip-form devolutions of it, the way that these series with perspectives and ideas and identities are degenerated down into small-form web videos. The fictional framing of these ideas is that it’s a documentary discussing some greater purpose, and what we see in those shows is like all the b-roll of every possible thing happening in the office.
I think that when you do cutaways to show events in the show, the things that people are reacting to you kind of diminish the value of these events, you break the bubble of the documentary conceit. Plus, it increases costs and scales up. What I’m thinking about is something that can be done in basically one room, which you shift around for different interviews, suggesting that you’re talking to a small crew of people, in single and group settings, in a few different meeting rooms. Everything you discuss needs to be discussed through these characters as narrators, and therefore, their perspectives, their delivery, their inflections.
And I have three basic ideas for different shows in this space, all following this basic structure.
The first one is inspired by this old edit I did of an Arrested Development joke inspired by Star Citizen.
It’s a frustrating joke because I realised well after it happened that the joke I wanted to tell is non-obvious. Because of course, the 2016 election happened in 2016, but then I had to contend with the way that, in America, the 2016 election started in 2014, and therefore, while what he’s saying is dumb, it’s not without some grounding. The point I was aiming for was an excuse that only kicks in when the project is already late.
Set the story in a game development studio where a small group of Q&A and documentation workers deal with the sorting algorithm of the workplace where they wind up discussing all the different ways in which the game industry is really weird. The whole thing told in a very steadycam, documentary style, but because there’s constant reallocation of people, the characters can rotate around in what their job titles are or what they’re doing and even the ways the project can keep going (or fail). In fact, if it’s a big business it can be as small as two people who are documenting the experience of working on two wildly different projects for one big company, and relating stories about how the characters they deal with are making that hard, all just quietly presenting extra-ridiculous versions of real stories from the industry.
I say this, but really I just want to make fun of Ken Levine and Peter Molyneaux, I think.
The other idea, the other much grimmer and darker idea, though, is the idea of doing this same kind of office documentary in the back rooms of a show like Infowars. That you have the people who don’t quite believe in the goals of this ridiculous idealogue, trying to grapple with explaining to themselves and one another just what they’re doing. Do they talk about their boss with incredulity? Is he serious? Is it all just performance? What about that time he got drunk and flirted with an alpaca on camera? How do we deal with the hatchets?
The idea for this though would be never actually showing the talent, and having the whole story told entirely through the reactions to the person. Dig into that same space of the ramshackle, confusing and entirely incestuous angle of storytelling, the way that these professional looking media frontends are entirely clueless, constantly making patches and kludges, and eventually, over time, driving everyone involved into the unfortunate combination of radical ideology and cynical emptiness.
Have it run twelve episodes. Episode twelve is what happens when the call screener (that they’re proud to claim they don’t use) calls in sick, and suddenly, with nobody to screen calls, they just get to hear their actual audience, calling up and saying the things they want to say… as the episode slowly collapses and shows horrified reaction shots from the characters we’ve been following. Then, the horror is multiplied as they listen to the talent they’ve been all along justifying reacts to the awful things they say as if it’s perfectly reasonable to just bop along with them.
and then they realise they have to get out, they have to quit.
I don’t think these are good ideas. I think these are interesting ideas, ideas that would need to be handled deftly to be both funny and horrifying, but also, to work without being just a magnification, an exacerbation and permission, for the things they’re meant to lampoon. I think they’re interesting, I think they’re fun to imagine, though, and I can’t help but wonder what kind of fodder could be made out of the interesting question of reasonable, sensible Q&A people talking to one another, candidly, about just how ridiculous their working conditions are.
For the Infowars style thing, yeah, it’d be an examination of how much conspiracies matter to being a conspiracy theorist. I kind of like the idea of it being entirely about looking at these systems and the emergent collaboration in response to incentives. Ie, how the world can work the way it does without conspiracy.