Listen to This

Now that I've been shown my destiny, it's time for Inspiration to flow my way (now, of course Csikszentmihalyi would say that being creative has nothing to do with these Romantic ideas of divine messages working through the artist independent of the artist themselves, but he's the person who tells you what a sausage roll is made of while you're eating one - the Spoiler, I call him. Everyone can be creative? Oh, fuck you. I'm going to read Nietzsche. He'll tell me I'm special, like the wonderful, crazy, adorably-bearded elitist that he was).

Well, because I am so very special, it didn't take long for Inspiration to come for a visit, put the kettle on, make me a cuppa and give me some choice material. So here it is in two words:

MODEL CITIZEN

It's Citizen Kane meets America's Next Top Model. Pret-A-Porter meets The West Wing. Tyra Banks meets her destiny. It's pure US sitcom poetry.

The pitch: Due to a polling error, a famous supermodel is mistakenly voted into office as a congresswoman for a small town. Rather than correct the error, the model's agency decides it will boost her career. The staff of the office must deal with the model and make her look as competent as possible to keep their jobs in the face of overwhelming new public scrutiny.

American sitcoms. They're so wonderfully reliable. A limited range of settings (office, apartment, house, bar, coffee shop), stock characters (the ditz, the sleaze, the bitch, the gay -- always male, why is that?) and ridiculous situations repeated endlessly (Janice. Oh. My. Gawd).

And Model Citizen has all this and more! The limited location -- the office of the congresswoman. The ridiculous situations repeated endlessly -- the show is, the staff do the model's work because she's stupid. Great! And it also has the stock characters; the ditzy model, the sleazy researcher, the bitchy personal assistant and the gay public relations guy. It's basically what Spin City could have been if someone had completely fucked it up (which they didn't. Well, not while Michael J. Fox was in it, anyway).

The problem with my deliciously cheesy sitcom pitch is that it sounds brilliant. It's an ironic, comedic examination of the conventions of the US sitcom (but that's been done with the wonderful Matt Stone/Trey Parker show That's My Bush! I wonder if that's available on DVD...) and could be considered the best piece of work I will ever create.

And if you think about Jane Feuer's point that "in order to perceive subversion, we must look at something besides narrative closure...these are the moments that one remembers (Feuer in Creeber 2001, p.68)," Model Citizen could be seen as the ultimate comment on our obssession with celebrity and our need to popularise affairs that play out in the public eye. It's also an analysis of the way in which we can only allow ourselves to engage with something if celebrities are attached to it. The line between politicians and celebrities has been blurred and this ridiculous sitcom is the dramatic manifestation of an ideology already becoming dominant in society.

What a load of shit.

Reference: Creeber, G (Ed) 2001, The Television Genre Book, British Film Institute, London.