New Show Idea!

I'm always trying to come with horrible new TV shows, in hopes of one day landing one with a TV exec and getting paid a decent amount of money (not "retirement" money, but "living comfortably while keeping my job" money) and getting to appear in the credits or something. You know, a legacy. And more bad TV!

In the past, most of my efforts have gone to a FOX-style TV show called "V.D. Island" which would have honestly fit in perfectly with the FOX steaming pile of reality crap television. It's basically "The Mole" meets "Tempation Island", in which you basically have 10 males and 10 females all with clean bills of health except for one who secretly has a venerial disease. I'm thinking it would be best to do this show with an STD that can be fought with antibiotics, but it's up to the producers. It's basically a show where contestants have to have sex with someone at least once a week and try not to get the disease. The real fun comes in when people realize they've GOT the disease and since nobody's booted off the island, they get to trick other people into having sex with them just to screw them out of the prize. Would it come down to rape? Who knows! It's FOX programming at it's finest, no?

The real FOX-style twist would be when on the final episode, as the host is announcing the winner who does not have the VD that everyone else has...

...the host stabs the winner in the arm with a syringe and screams "YOU'VE GOT VD!" and hope on a helicopter as all of the signs flip-change to read an extra "ESCAPE FROM" over the "V.D. ISLAND"! Now it's a NEW reality show where 20 people with V.D. have six weeks to escape from V.D. Island! Plus, as an incentive, for every week they DON'T escape, they airdrop in a ravenous lion - who also has V.D.! The show would only obviously last two seasons (or whenever they get cancelled due to death-related lawsuits), but I think that's enough to get the ratings and merchandising enough to turn a profit.

I'm off the toppic - I have a NEW show idea. It's certainly not good enough for FOX (and by that, I mean "not profitable or horrendous enough") but it would do well on a network like maybe Food Network, given the nature of it.

I'm still working on a title.

Here's the premise:

A crew goes to a fast-food place, somewhere that has those deceptive-looking pictures of menu items (I've found them mostly at Chinese places, but most fast food locations would work just as well) and you basically tell the cashier that you will pay $100 if they can produce in ten minutes the equivelant food item that is represented in the picture. The footage would show the crew scrambling to adjust things or maybe make something fresh for a change just to try and piece together all of the elements of the picture in order to satisfy the judge. The end result would be a photo match showing the picture and the item, and if it comes close enough they get the money to be split among the crew, otherwise they get paid the regular value of the item.

Since the ten minutes of time they need to make the item is obviously not long enough for one full half-hour episode (I doubt that even with minimal editing, there isn't even going to be ten full minutes of footage that's airworthy), Food Network might have the classier programming to maybe take a few minutes to do some background on the location, or air the letter or video send in requesting that their team tackle this location. I can't wait to see angry patrons showing video of the picture on the menu and the pathetic excuses for food that are served, demanding this kind of satisfaction to be televised. Maybe as a bonus, they have that patron who sent the request actually show up at the location to eat the end results and maybe give a food rating or just a statement of gratitude.

Maybe as a show-off, they could have a moderately-famous chef as the host and after the ten-minute judging, the chef would get behind the counter and use their ingredients to try and out-do them in making the visual masterpiece? The possibilities are quite extensive. I think it would make for great bad-TV, something you flip to and wonder what it is long enough to stay tuned, like a car accident that piques your interest.

What do you think? Would you watch this kind of show? Should I create a real pitch for it? Do you have restaurants screwing you over with inaccurate visual representations of their food? Should I just stick to "V.D. Island"-type shows?

(Fact: My dad used to order burgers from Carl's Jr. with the phrase "extra messy" because he wanted them to accurately represent the sloppy claims made in the TV advertisements. For those of you not familiar with one of Carl's Jr. or their slogans, "If it doesn't get all over the place - it doesn't belong in your face.")