Gals in Charge

Last year, there was a kind of competition to have The Next MacGyver on telly. Anyone could participate (so I did!), and the main idea was that gals were to be in charge (I liked that).
Fast forward to today, and the new MacGyver is a testosterone-fuelled reboot of the original with the usual quota of (annoying, background sound bite) women. [That's one series I won't be watching]

Since I've decided to write the plots that had come to my mind, I'm sharing what I sent with you:

My title was:
Ever Heard of_

My logline was:

After years spent in Europe, Morgan Simon was going to meet her father at La Guardia, but he seems to have disappeared. As she goes looking for him, she rescues a lovely mathematician, who happens to have a secret life. Who needs urban legends when you meet people from a real secret society?

My sort-of summary/catchphrase:

No need for urban legends when you join a real secret society.

My first three episodes titles ans one-liners summaries:

1-     _ Eventful Encounters?: Morgan rescues Léah from clumsy thieves, and she joins the secret society.

2-     _Meeting the Family?: Morgan’s IT job (Problem #1) keeps being interrupted by her new friends coming to meet her (Problem #2), and McMaster is abducted by a mad scientist who wants to sell her to the highest bidder (Problem #3).

3-     _the Antikythera?: A mis-archived papyrus gives the location (in riddles) of three ancient Greek computers much more complicated than the damaged one that was found in 1901. What can they actually do? And who will get to them first?

My (main - and female) protagonists' names and descriptions:

-         Morgan Simon is a computer witch and a genius who gets easily bored; therefore, she’ll read about anything and she’ll try everything. She’s just arrived to New York City, where her father didn’t welcome her at the airport, and she goes looking for him, while balancing her new job – and her new friends’ challenges.

-         Léah Wenn is an unemployed mathematician who isn’t homeless because her society’s friends are helping her. She’s the busiest of them all.

-         Chris McMaster is the leader of the secret society. She’s a blind biologist who came up with a defence weapon that combines drugs and other elements that actually incapacitate bad guys in seconds (and that is completely safe) if her delegates need to make an escape.

My synopsis of the pilot episode:

When Morgan Simon’s father fails to show at the airport where she’s just landed, she starts looking for him on the net. She ends up at an airfield where, thanks to her love for strategy (and her passion for MMORPG and Live Action Games, plus a good poker face) she helps Léah Wenn get away from nasty people who are stealing industrial secrets for even nastier people. The ladies take a small plane, but neither has actually ever flown; while taking off worked fine, landing will be an issue, and Morgan has to feed an autoland programme into the plane’s computer with a laptop that has a faulty Wi-Fi connection. If they manage to land, Léah will need Morgan’s help in order to retrieve secrets that must stay secret, and that means that Léah will have to trust Morgan with her secrets (like working for a group with no legal status and no official connection that aims at fighting for the welfare of all) – and probably with her life, too.

I don't know if it's good.
I don't know if the written short stories will be good.
But I'm writing my plots.

Still Missing Him

After watching a series I really love tonight, I started changing channels, firmly convinced that I'd turn the telly off to go back to my computer. There was a channel showing episodes of The Mentalist; I found myself watching because I'll always associate the last episode of that series with the last time I was happy before He left for the island with no phones and no Wi-Fi.

It's been 568 days, and I'll keep counting until I start packing to go to the island myself...

Apart from the fact that I can still smile or cry thinking about Him, there's a Cole Porter song that makes me think of Him.

Here's a version of it with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire:

Same Old Same Old - The "Next" MacGyver Edition

Alas, this is not about the old series where a lovely guy saved the day with some gum and a paper-clip.

Nope.

I went looking for a TV calendar in order to check when my siblings could start sending me spoilers about my favourite shows again, and I found a mention of the next MacGyver's first episode.

You see, last year I shipped my own plot bunnies to the Next MacGyver competition. When I got a message telling me that my script ideas weren't selected for the next step, I remember sending an answer wishing them luck and promising to watch the new series (what's not to love about women kicking arses and saving the day with some gum and a paper-clip... and maybe some GPS device to update the concept?).

I quite like my ideas, and I'm somehow glad that I find myself free to develop them without having studio people telling me to change "this, and that, and that... Oh, and maybe that, too".

I hadn't checked the project since last year, but I investigated a bit after reading the première date. Then, I had to dig deeper, because the competition I'd joined was about promoting women and having a female "MacGyver" as the next number 1 in the cast, but I was reading about blokes, and more blokes.

I must admit that I was barely caffeinated, and I briefly thought I'd stumbled upon a different project, but... no.

Shelved is the idea of the next MacGyver being played by a woman; it's all about cunning men saving the world (from inside the US government apparently, and there's one woman around, but she sounds like a right ungrateful, entitled bitch - on paper, at least). 

I don't know how the initial project was killed, but I'm not interested in that remake - at all.

I don't know if it's rampant sexism, fear about something new, fear about having too much science (and too many women?) in one show, but I don't care. This "MacGyver" doesn't look interesting or challenging enough.

There's one good thing, though: my own plot bunnies from the competition just hopped ahead in my writing queue.