another rejection letter from Hollywood

For those of you have closely followed my writing I have more terrible news; Hollywood has just let me know that they have once again rejected one of my TV show premises. This is doubly painful as I was sure that this was the one that was going to launch my career.  It was groundbreaking. The episodes practically wrote themselves. It made me wonder whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.

To be completely transparent, I did not write that last sentence. I believe it was from an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies.

Instead of asking you to just believe what I’m saying at face value, let me tell you a little about the show.

It was to be a remake of Gilligan’s Island.

The twist? (and this is really where the idea takes off) All seven of the characters are played by emigrant transgenders! Gilligan, Captain Jonas “The Skipper” Grumby, Professor Roy Hinkley and Thurston Howell III are all females and adult film star Ginger Grant, Mary Ann Summers and “Lovey” Wentworth-Howell are men.

How did the seven of them get on the island in the first place?

Legal pressure applied by immigration activists on Washington leads to release of all transgender detainees held in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers. Following the letter of the law, ICE officials load sixty of them onto a plane and then “release” them… at a height of several hundred feet into the ocean. Hundreds of miles away from the U.S.

Seven of them are able to make it to a previously uncharted island.

Controversial. Topical. Funny. The Gilligan’s Island reboot would have been ratings gold.

A couple tweaks to the theme song…

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip
That started from this tropic port
Aboard a Lockheed C-130 Hercules.

The political climate started getting rough,
The protocol was tossed,
If not for a raft made of the bodies of the other fifty three drowned transgenders
All records of this incident would be lost.

The survivors set foot on the shore of this uncharted desert isle
With Gilligan
The Skipper too,
A millionaire and her ‘wife’,
A movie star
The Professor and Mary Ann,
Here on Gilligan’s Isle.

… and we’d be ready to roll.

The pilot was going to open the same way the original series did; the seven of them sitting on the beach listening to a giddy Rush Limbaugh reporting about their disappearance, on a small radio that Mary Ann had smuggled in his rectum. The rest of the show would be consumed with the group exploring the island, exploring gender roles, building huts, and finding food.

Future episodes would have the intrepid castaways building any number of outrageous items like pedal-powered cars and a St. Andrew’s Cross out of bamboo, gourds, and vines, having disturbing dream sequences involving stars of the WNBA, local natives terrorizing the castaways (also involving stars of the WNBA), discovering crates of radioactive seeds washing up out of nowhere, battling a giant spider, and Dick Cheney’s helicopter crash-landing on the island. The seven transgenders nurse him back to health only to have him get rescued and make a point of leaving them behind so the truth never gets out.

Humor with a heart. Talking about the tough issues of the day and making light of them.

But no.

Hollywood once again didn’t have the stomach to produce a surefire hit. Pearls before swine.

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother to be brilliant.