We all have fantasies. I’ve always had a fantasy of walking down the street, telling a friend about a TV show I’ve come up with, and being stopped by an impeccably dressed TV executive. He calls me a genius, hands me a briefcase full of cash, and disappears into the crowd. It’s because of this unrealistic fantasy that I refuse to tell anyone an idea I have unless I’m around a lot of well dressed strangers.

I don’t need artistic control or notoriety. I’d rather not be the guy people try to find in the phone book when their show doesn’t live up to expectations. Just give me my cash, say “that’s the best idea I’ve ever heard” and away with you.

Since the Sopranos ended, I see the need for the next great show. That’s why I spent the entire weekend walking the City pretending to talk on my cell phone about my show ideas. No one stopped me, but here are my ideas.

Break Up TV

There’s a show on MTV called “Sweet 16″. The show follows one spoiled brat each episode while she plans a party to celebrate “becoming a woman” and her affluent parent’s inability to say no.

The premise of my show is similar. Except instead of planning a party, the person is going to break up with his or her boyfriend/girlfriend. The first few minutes of the episode will be dedicated to the back story and show why breaking up is so hard. The next few minutes will be used to explain why, no matter how difficult, breaking up is the only way. Then the rest of the episode is relegated to demonstrative heartbreak.

Is there anything more awkward than hearing someone say “We need to talk”? Wouldn’t that be fun to watch? The best part is you’d have these young people on TV trying to sound as if they know anything about relationships and would use the phrase “respect myself” as if they owned stock in it.

Even though this would be a reality TV show, I can pretty much script out the pilot episode. Mindy (14) has been dating Jared (17) for the past two years. They’re in love and have promised to be together forever, but one day Mindy hears Jared went over to her friend Bonnie’s place to “study” together. This is the final straw and she confronts Jared.

Mindy: “Why would you disrespect me like that? Bonnie’s my friend.”
Jared: “I’m just a squirrel trying to get a nut”.
Mindy: “I respect myself and can’t be with someone who would run around behind my back”
Jared: “Can I touch your boobs?”

This Is The Life

Some people enjoy shows that dispel the reality of certain careers. For instance, Seinfeld never seemed to work and Grey’s Anatomy makes hospitals look like a great place to make friends.

I personally don’t like watching people in high paying jobs having a better time than me (makes me look like a sucker). My show would take high paying jobs or “action packed positions” and show them for what they really are – jobs.

The show would start with a 33 year old lawyer waking up in the morning, hours before the sun comes up. When he gets to his office he sits behind stacks of papers on his desk and goes through contracts. He deals with his bitchy boss, his phone rings constantly and the sweat stains under his arms grow throughout the day. When it’s time to go home to his greedy wife and spoiled, snotty kids, it’s dark again.

I’d watch that show every day. They could show episodes with magazine publishers, comedians, filmmakers, modeling agencies, bartenders, cops, hot dog venders at baseball games, etc. Anything that someone THINKS is a good job would make a great show.

My Big Mistake

Keeping with the single episode reality programming, this idea revolves around people’s biggest mistakes of their lives. The first episode could be about Hank and how he opted to pass on ebay stock when it was just a small site no one had heard of. The entire episode would show what his life would be life if he had bought that stock. The network would set this guy up in a house and give him a ton of money for one day. He’d be so happy riding his little golf cart around the estate, drinking champagne and taking a dip into his giant crystal clear pool… and then they would take it away from him. He’d then continue his life knowing how things would have been different if he hand’t made that one mistake.

They could have computer simulations, financial projections and reenacted situations to show a person how their life would have turned out if they hadn’t made that mistake. It would be brutal, cruel and incredibly entertaining. Note – The season finale would feature Howard Dean.

Survivor – States

Survivor has needed a kick in the ass for the past 6-8 years. No one cares about starving dorks standing on a pole for three hours anymore.

Survivor needs some real stakes. Well, I’ve got em.

50 contestants, representing each state…winner gets Puerto Rico.

No one really knows where Puerto Rico fits into the United States, but my guess is most states wouldn’t mind adding Puerto Rico’s tourist revenue to their economy.

Look how excited people get over a show about washed up stars learning to dance. What do those people win? The embarrassment of being a dance champion? Everyone would watch Survivor – States to root for their state if Puerto Rico was on the line. Even when the state you’re rooting for was eliminated, you’d probably still tune in to make sure states like New Jersey or Delaware don’t win.

Each of these TV shows is up for sale. I’ll sell them to the highest bidder or to the person with the nicest hair.

I don’t care for the truth. I can’t handle the truth…

Hello. My name is Patrick…and I’m a Jim Carrey fan. It started almost 13 years ago when I watched a movie about a pet detective who I now recognize as an obnoxious coke head. I didn’t think it was a problem until I started looking up showtimes for Fun with Dick and Jane. I knew I needed serious help when I considered going to an afternoon matinee of Jim’s dramatic work in The Number 23, even after reading countless reviews that defecated on it.

I know I’m not alone. People have confided their admiration for Jim to me late at night. After all the beer is gone and we’ve spent an hour or two searching through youtube for one last great clip someone might mention Jim Carrey. Sometimes they’ll bring up a movie like Liar Liar with pride, but most of the time someone will say “see if they have any clips from Liar Liar, I love that movie”. And they don’t say it in the same way they say they love something acceptably unique like Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. No, they say it half expecting to shout “just joking” if no one agrees right away.

For those of you strong enough to proclaim your love for Liar Liar, I’m there with you in solidarity. Seriously, the movie’s funny. Period. Sure it’s corny, overacted and the redemption plot line is so sickly sweet that you’re half hoping for the kid to get his hair caught in an airline engine, but I’ll defend that movie any day. I still think this is as funny as any scene in cinematic history.

I laugh every time I think of the line “you’ve met (his wife) at the Christmas parties. She’s the one that get’s plastered and calls him a retard”. Gold. Comedy gold.

Obviously, for me, one of the reasons I enjoy that movie so much is because of Jim Carrey (Come on…this clip is brilliant and no one could do this better than Jim Carrey. Ray Romano? Chris Rock? Nope.). The other reason I liked Liar Liar is because of the basic premise. It proves that lying is such an engrained and accepted part of our lives that NOT LYING is a fantastical idea for an outrageous comedy. “Just hear me out. What would happen if you couldn’t lie? You’d be fucked, right?”

I like lying. I do it every day. The good news is that my lies are known as “white lies”. Ask me what I had for breakfast. Would you believe oatmeal? How bought cantaloupe? Does it really matter?

Like most people who define their actions as “the exception to the rule” my white lies are harmless and for the most part necessary. However, claiming lying is necessary isn’t easy since we were taught lying is wrong from day one.

The first day a child is taught the difference between right and wrong, they are told honesty is right and lying is wrong. Who decided this? For some reason people think honesty is the best policy. They think they will be able to move along in their lives just dealing with the truth at all times. It’s not a surprise. We all want to be believe someone when they say “this is a great report” and not wonder if they mean it.

However, honesty all the time wouldn’t lead to an ideal society. Sitting in a meeting and saying “excuse me, could you repeat that? I wasn’t paying attention because I was wondering why I am feeling so gassy” doesn’t help anything. Neither does telling the woman at Starbucks to “stop smiling. Your life sucks too!” If honesty were really the best policy, than questions like “so honey, what are you thinking about right now?” wouldn’t be allowed while laying down.

What if things were switched and the common practice was to lie first, honest second. In a lot of ways, we’ve already adopted this practice with calling out sick for work. When an employee says “can’t come into work, I’m sick” it’s a pretty safe bet they’re doing anything BUT laying around sniffling into tissues.

Honesty certainly isn’t more fun than lying. In the land of lying, you can be late to an appointment for a million reasons. Maybe there was traffic, a sick man on the subway or you had repel down the side of a building because the elevators were broken. In the land of honesty, you’re late because you didn’t care enough to be on time.

I for one wouldn’t mind a society that accepted lies. When I ask a waiter if the halibut is fresh, I’m insisting that he lie to me. Obviously, you’d like to hear “no, it’s been sitting in the mop bucket for three weeks” if that’s the truth, but you’d rather hear “yes. We caught it this morning” because you like the idea of eating fresh Halibut.

The same goes for airline pilots. When the plane starts bouncing around through a batch of turbulence, I want the pilot to come on the loudspeaker and say “Sorry for the bumps, ladies and gentleman. Just so you know, a plane has never crashed because of turbulence. Even if we ran into trouble, this plane is built out of bouncy, non-blow-up-able, rubber.” Please! Lie to me! Even if the odds are 1 in 1,000,000,000 we’ll crash, I don’t want to know about that one chance.

If everyone is lying, than not only will I not feel guilty about saying things like “I’m very much enjoying my job” but people won’t feel bad when they say things to me like “our friendship is too important to me to become physical with you”. Instead I could say “This job is helping me fulfill I bet I made” and people could say “I don’t want you to find out my vagina is square”. Much more interesting, don’t you think? Same result, too.

The other beautiful thing about accepted lying is that you’d be able to fit in the truth every once in a while and have people just write it off as a lie. “Sorry, boss, I can’t come in today. I’m still in bed with Barbara from Accounting”.

That’s not how it works though. In the end we are encouraged to say “It was my fault” instead of “it was like this when I got here”, “you look great” instead of “you look fat” and “I totally get it” instead of “why the fuck is Oprah famous?” Lying may not be accepted, but it’s necessary.

Not just for lawyers with annoying kids and wives who marry the guy from the Princess Bride. Everyone has to lie. Hell, I started this article off by telling a complete lie about liking Jim Carrey. Is that the truth? No. But at this point, you don’t really care any more…dickhead!

In High School, there are two safe havens: 1) The Woods, 2) The Car. The past two weekends I spent significant time in both… 

“You two will be sharing a tent with Julie and Ken,” I was informed by my girlfriend’s cousin. “They’re nice people, but I hear he snores a bit”.

I smiled and continued to unpack the car. As soon as Judi’s cousin was out of ear shot I threw my sleeping bag against a tree. “I got a job specifically so I wouldn’t have to sleep on the ground,” I growled.

Yes, I was camping. The great outdoors. The wild. Nature. Call it what you will, but, to me, it has been, and always will be, a place I went in order to get away from parent supervision. High schoolers have one goal – have fun WITHOUT adult supervision. That’s it. That’s the goal. Forget extra curricular activities to make you more attractive to college. Forget sports and the “big game” on Saturday. The only thing anyone strives for in high school is to be left alone.

I thought everyone understood this. Why else would people do something as stupid as sleeping on the ground with only a thin sheet protecting you from bugs, rain, cold and bears? The sleeping conditions and total lack of activity was the trade off for having a place where you could drink beer and sleep next to your girlfriend without having to jump up and pretend to be doing something different every time someone knocked on the door.

Unfortunately, not everyone thought this way. Some people actually enjoyed chopping wood, waking up with a cold, sticky dew on their face and peeing against rocks. And I was surrounded by them. Not only did they like chopping wood, but they enjoyed watching someone else chop wood while they waited their turn to give the log a few hacks.

While sitting around a smoldering camp fire from the afternoon’s round of hot dogs, one of the fellow campers proclaimed, “Isn’t great to just get away for a weekend, have a couple beers during the day, eat a few dogs?”

People nodded in agreement, but not me. Trying to keep from starting an argument, I kept my mouth shut, but part of me really wanted to ask how these people weren’t able to have a beer and a hot dog every weekend if they wanted to? Hot dogs are pretty easy to make and, last I checked, one of the few things even I can afford. Beer during the day? The very definition of the weekend should be “activities that won’t suffer if you were to have a beer or two during the day”. Maybe these people had been burned one too many times by getting drunk and going to Home Depot and buying hundreds of dollars of plywood they don’t need.

I have a place where I can sit, drink a beer and munch on some hot dogs. It’s called my apartment and it just so happens to have a bed in it and the chances of being attacked by a bear are significantly less.

However, by the time we packed the car to head back to the city, I had gotten used to being dirty, had finally mastered the twelve zippers involved in entering and exiting our tent and started drowning myself in beer before bed so I wouldn’t wake up when our tent mates snored. Overall, the weekend had been a success (mainly because of a few rules I’ll address in a future blog) and I returned to my adult unsupervised apartment.

The following weekend I found myself in the other high school seclusion spot – the car. This time I had gone up to Vermont (where the parents roam). Being older, I’m quicker to say “back off, mom” and I no longer mind watching my mom’s distraught face when I say “did we drink an entire twelve pack already?” No, I was in the car for nostalgic reasons and for what I’ll call “quirk factor” at the drive-in.

The drive-in movie theatre has gone way of the eight track and pogo ball, but there is a grass covered drive-in still up and running in Bethel Vermont. The audio is thin and tinny and the picture is dark and hazy, but not even the random holes in the screen don’t matter because you’re viewing the movie from the privacy of your own car.

In high school, the drive-in was the perfect place to make out with your girlfriend or do any other form of debauchery you could think of within the confines of a four seater. This time around, it was all about quirk factor.

Four of us piled into the car with a case of beer and some snacks. It had been raining most of the evening and when someone asked what we were going to do if the movie got rained out, my brother responded “we’re not going to the drive-in to watch the movie”.

Ideally you go to the movies to watch a good, entertaining movie, however, since this was our only chance to go to the drive-in, we went to see Norbit. Search your memory and you might start to remember thinking “that movie looks horrible” whenever you saw Eddie Murphy dressed as a big fat woman saying things like “No you di-nint”. Well, as advertised it was horrible, but none of us cared.

The intermission film they showed before the movie started was worth the price of admission alone. Produced around 1963, the film encouraged us to visit the concession stand by showing the different food options available dancing. Each food item got an entire minute to perform its routine before a clock came on the screen and it was announced how much time was left before the movie started. This old timey count down was especially creepy when we had to watch a hot dog bun convince a hot dog to jump in him.

Another superfluous aspect of the evening’s entertainment is when you get to sneak a peak at the surrounding car’s “privacy”. About ten minutes into the movie and just after the thirtieth “this movie is horrible” comment, a light popped on in the car next to us. We all diverted our eyes away from the screen and onto the action within the car to see a woman wearing nothing but her undies crawl into the car’s back seat.

“Jackpot!” my brother yelled even though (or party because) the woman wasn’t exactly the type of woman you hope to see almost naked. “That woman is probably someone’s mother!”

Regardless of the woman’s parental status, she apparently thought watching Norbit in the back of her car was a sufficiently sexy place. Her nakedness was far more interesting than the movie and marginally more entertaining than when the film fell off the reel and people began honking their horns in a “someone messed up, honk, honk!” type of way.

As the end credits rolled we gathered our empty beer bottles and my brother and I peed in the bushes one last time. We were adults acting like children and even though we didn’t have to hide the beer bottles when we got back to my mom’s house, we did anyway.