Kickass Screenplay Ideas: Capsule Edition

These could be shows or movies. It could go either way. Just a roundup of short sweet pitches!

Made Maid - gritty Sopranos-style blackly-satirical drama about a meter maid who has shall we say "connections." Hilarity ensues.

Beverly Hills King - exiled European monarch Beniface Koeburr Goth-Saxa XIV visits Beverly Hills and through a series of mishaps and misunderstandings is accidentally declared King. Hilarity ensues in this reverse-bildungsroman comedy of manners.

Hilarity and Sue - Sue, underappreciated, friendless, bitter and brilliant comedy writer working on a middling hit family-style sitcom alongside a group of other writers who just don't "get" her, retreats into her imagination by creating a series of misanthropic story arc ideas (for the show, for her own life, for the world in general) which are played out onscreen.

Leaning toward tv show on that last one. This next one, definitely a 1-hour episodic drama series:

Emergency Response - Starts off apparently another well-done procedural, this one focusing in on main characters drawn from the whole spectrum of emergency management, from FEMA and National Guard all the way down the chain to street cops and paramedics (and a journo or two to widen the scope). Their diverse characters and stories are woven together as they cope with an emergency in a major U.S. metropo- fuck it, it's Los Angeles. The first half-season story arc takes you inside the handling of a major emergency (earthquake or bombing or riot or something similarly large-scale - but emphatically not a volcano!). Viewers get a chance to empathize and indentify with the main characters, to care about them. Then as the first crisis fades, odd reports begin to creep in. That's when the real raison d'etre for the series rears its ugly head, as we bear grim witness to the rise of the dead. Zombies! From the first isolated, conflicting and confused reports, unfolding over weeks with shock and disbelief as the problem spreads, then seems containable, then completely breaks out of control and the world sinks, with agonizing slowness, into hell. Most of our major characters from the various strata end up banded together to face the menace as best they can.

Note on that last one: yeah I know, "zombies?" I should have pitched it a few years back when the idea occurred to me, right? But, to me, none of your zombie movies have ever really given you the hard eyes-open look at the slow disintegration of society that, to me, would be the scariest part of the scenario! They all pretty much skip to straight to the apocalypse. Yet to me, the sight of normal life coming apart and sliding into bedlam is by far the more horrific. Members of the general public first trying to live their lives as normal, in shock and denial, figuring law enforcement and the army must have it handled! Then beginning to doubt in the face of what's clearly growing out of control. People escalating into panic at different rates. The stage at which freaking and panicking humans are every bit as bad a threat as the undead (who remain for the most part off-screen until Season 2 really goes to hell at the midpoint).

Hand me a development deal, anybody - I dare you.