*A story or film noir about private investigator who is also a serial killer. He gets hired to find out what has become of people but the people were, in fact, killed by him. He simply waits a week or two, then announces to the client that he has solved the case; he gets paid, says "it was me who did it", then shoots the client and waits for someone to hire him to find out what happened to the previous client, thus ensuring a steady business.
Dexter without the (main character's) redeeming features and sense of actual justice? (However, we can already assume that our 'hero'/'heroine' might need a good dose of Mentalist-level thought processes, to choose just the right victim to
only get the right client, rather than annoy the local police/press as well, enough to foil his/her plans. That client already being 'just the right victim' to only get the attention of the right client. Which indicates a form of outside-the-law clique, or at least a logical chain of connectivity, perhaps deeper into the heart of some outside-the-law parallel society to any that the normal forces of law and order tend to operate in and amongst and over.
With good (better than me) writers, that could be a long-runner. With a gripping story-arc. That (hopefully) makes more sense than something like Lost eventually didn't.
Ummm... constructive addition needed, not just PTW-fodder... How about..? we need more Discworld put to the screen. Done well.
I still hope
CSI: Ankh-Morpork 'The Watch' gets off the ground. It's been more than three years since I saw the series-preview-trailer-thingummy, and very little word from Narrativia or elsewhere since.
Except that's not Original. So let's try something else... A good plot needs an 'edge', a core set of of individuals tied to a situation, whether physical, geographic, social or whatever. Something that's not been done before, though, which rules out robots-that-look-like-humans, mountain rescue teams, the inhabitants of apartment complexes, lighthouse keepers, deep-space explorers, hospital emergency rooms, paranormal investigations, ... etc.
Has there been anything centred around the hijinks/trials-and-tribulations of a printing company? As a comedy, there's plenty of scope for the obvious mixing up of product (e.g. posters with slogans and pictures hilariously misaligned and switched between two totally different contracts, perhaps as a recurring theme/running joke) and, if serious, there's the tensions of the contract manager necessarily bringing in paying work that does not sit well with themselves/the floorstaff (highlighting intolerance and issues both within and without the workforce, perhaps both at the same time) and the increasingly losing battle against that modern competitor, the web and the many and various electronic self-publication possibilities.
In either comic
or serious versions, the series could start with the introduction of the new Web Outreach Manager/whatever, brought in to bolster the failing family concern by offering Vanity Publishing/Print-On-Demand opportunities. He/she is introduced (as, incidentally are we, the viewer) the team of close-knit-yet-internally-divided individuals that have worked with (and against) each other for many, many years, and may find the newcomer a threat to their position in the company or an ally in the battle in the internal conflict between various sub-groups of the operation (e.g. the maintenance men against the machine operators, or the whole floor-staff against the management), perhaps in surprising (and occasionally inverted) ways, as the fresh thinking comes in and turns established practices upside-down, even whilst the newbug learns that not
all the ideas that they brought in with them from their previous position/educational establishment actually work as well as they could in the real-world experience of the industry.
We could probably use some inversion, too (humorous or not). There's a posh lad, fourth son of a successful magnate/stately-home lord (the latter only really working here in Blighty) who is beyond the "heir and a spare, and a spare-spare" stage in inheritance and so actually likes the basic job of keeping the inking rollers well-inked, and so is rebelling against both his successful parents/heir-apparent who like the big business and perhaps his other 'playboy attitude' elder siblings who just rely upon their extensive trust-funds/allowances. It would of course be assumed that the lord/magnate dislikes the whole idea of this printing firm and wants to bulldoze it off of his land and/or buy it out as (insignificant, not that it matters) competition to his own interests in the industry.
Meanwhile, the firm is actually owned by a low-class individual, perhaps a local farmer who happened to make it big in some unexpected way and bought into/created the business. They don't dress well, and stays in his back-room executive office, much of the time conducting business by proxy; there's a partner in management who scrubs up well who does all the actual client-facing business and of course word to the floor goes through intermediaries. In the comedic version (if not the other, but even then quite possibly), he can probably be mistaken for the janitor or even a local tramp when he actually wanders through the shop floor (anyone who ever knew, at the low end of the pay-scale, only ever managed to convey "him, oh, he's harmless, don't worry about him" to the others, who assume just someone a little eccentric) with either deliberate intent or laughable (dis-)synchronicity conspiring to prevent the mid-level people from trying to boss around/evict the 'vagrant' or else suck up to their boss, whilst transitioning through 'their' areas of the works.
(If the guy is the founder, or long-standing enough to have been around during boom-time building works, he's probably got(/knows of) a back stairway out of the office that he doesn't want to hang around in down to the main press areas, and (deliberately or otherwise) keeps out of the way when the board who know him go down to the shop floor. This his remotely tannoyed pronouncements (or memos, with supremely bad handwriting for the opportunity of extra laughs/drama due to misinterpretations) thus never get linked to the cloudcuckoolander that everyone
sees.)
There'll be some link between these two characters, the upper-class and lower-class switcheroonies. I suspect that the boss would find the fourth-son's family ties to the person opposed to the business (for whatever reason) to be quite useful. But whether the FS
knows that he's passing secrets/misinformation back and forth is an open question. (As is whether the FS has even told his dad! The sudden revealing of this fact could be a plot-point in one episode of the series (threatened disinheritance?), so long as it's a logical part of a longer plot arc for the series/end-of-the-series climax. Unless it can be written away as an "everything back to normal at the end of the episode"... perhaps specifically a dream episode, thus everything resetting again.)
But that's just an idea off the top of my head. It might need extensive retooling due to the fact that I've not got a
clue how the printing business works (or
could work, with enough contrivances and plot-twisting involved), but it was the first idea I had that didn't seem to have already been done (road-sweepers - check; one household on a street vs. their neighbours - check; public transport drivers - check;...). Although, saying that, it probably has been. But, if not, feel free to run with it. And perhaps then tell me how I can eventually watch it to see if it actually works out.
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Topic: Original Story/Movie ideas (Read 5455 times)